Tony Nesca

In Winnipeg, Canada, though I moved back to Turin, Italy (the city I was born in) several times.

I was always anti-school, anti-authority. I never enjoyed school - not at the lementary level, not in high school, and not even in University. If anything, it helped to frame the rebellion in me, give birth to the rebellious writing I do today.

I started at the age of 27, but keep in mind that I still have a regular job - the writer that can make a complete living from their writing is a rare animal indeed - especially if you write fiction. When I traded my guitar, a Gibson Les Paul, mind you, one of the top guiatrs in the world, I felt sadness and excitement at the same time - sadness that I had given up my dream to be a full-time musician, but excited that I had choosen a new artform, that of the writer. I started writing frenetically right away, and am still doing so today 23 years and 18 books later.

The poem is a different thing altogether  from the story- you have to get to the spot quick, take a bite, and blow through it almost cathartically, as fast as you can, or at least that"s the way I do it. You say deep things in as a concise way as possible. I usually write autobiographical fiction based on my life - sometimes closely based, sometimes further from my real life. But that"s what I prefer writing about most.

The first thing to make me write wasn"t a story, it was a novel - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I was blown away, I felt reborn. I knew after that moment that writing was my calling, it was unavoidable.

Henry Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, Hunter Thompson, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Silvia Plath, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Virginia Woolf, Tom Waits, John Lennon, Ted Prokash, Ali Kinteh, CS Fuqua, Anais Nin, GH Neale, Scott Laudati, etc.. These are all writers with different styles, different voices, but they all write in the same tradition—they are rebels, they are experimenters, they listen to their own hearts, they do not follow trends. Some write straight from the guts, some are more cerebral, but they are all unique. These writers are famous, but nowhere near as famous as, say, George. R. R. Martin or J.K. Rowling - why? Because, as I have said, there aren"t explosions or magic or action adventure, that is the sad pulse of today"s art and culture.

No, my wife and I do not collaborate on books, we simply publish together as owners and editors of Screamin" Skull Press. We do advise each other, of course, but that"s the end of it. Everything I write is inspired by her, she"s my everything. My personal favorite of her"s is her latest book of prose and poetry, Let It Bleed.

About A Girl is a very special book for me, one of my favorites, and also my best- seller. It was the book where my own true voice finally burst through and it was my second novel. I wrote it in a white/light blast of stream of consciousness in 8 weeks, then only rewrote it once, to keep that spontaneous feel in it, to keep that garage-rock identity alive. It"s considered a rugged contemporary, underground classic, and I am very proud of it. It"s alive, it"s unlike anything out there, it comes from the guts and the heart, not the brain, which makes it emotional and experimental. 

All my books are written quickly, in spontaneous prose and poetry, then revised only once. They book took about 2 or 3 months, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more. The reason for this is because Iam writing street-poetry and literature and I want my work to feel and sound completely different from the norm. I want to do what counter-culture in the 60"s and 70"s did to the mainstream, which is kick it in the ass. La Gioconda is about a boozy, rock and roll, sexual love-affair between two students in Canada - one a foreign exchange student from France, the other an Italian-Canadian student. Bulletproof Smile is a collection of short stories and poems.

Reviews are all best taken with a grain of salt - they don"t mean anything, not really. If they"re all bad, of course that makes you feel lousy, and if they are all good, that makes you feel great. But it"s best to keep them at arm"s length, to peruse them from time to time, to post them to social media for sales purposes, but never make them a motivator.

I had an intense desire to write a group of short stories that stand on their own, but when you read the entire book, all have very subtle connections to each other. Minor characters in one story, appear as the main characters in another, and many of them know each other, or are connected in some way. There was also a desire to stretch my wings creatively - I wanted to write about all phases of my life (with my usual fictionalization of course), childhood, teenage years, adulthood, and also I wanted to touch on the fact that I was raised in two countries, Italy and Canada. I normally write what is considered street-writing, characters and situations that live in dark neighborhoods surrounded by on-the-fringe lifestyles. There is still an element of that in Junkyard Lucy, stories about ghetto-living, but this time I wanted to do more, go deeper. One story might be about an Italian village I lived in as an adolescent, while the next story could be about a couple of twenty-somethings scrambling for concert tickets to see their favorite rock band in Canada. And there is always sex, drugs and rock and roll.

I founded Screamin" Skull Press in 1994 as a cool sounding name to publish my books under. At the beginning it was just 45-50 page chapbooks of stories and poems, then in 2001 I wrote and published my first full length novel called Dishpig. My wife, Nicole Nesca, a great poet and writer in her own right, joined in 2008 and has wrote and published 5 books of her own under the Screamin" Skull banner. I began my own publishing imprint because I knew, after many rejection letters, that I would be waiting forever to see my writing in print. To be frank, there is too much pushed out into the world today that is bland and formulaic. Every other book is a rip-off of another rip- off. The bookstores are packed with these endless vampire stories and dystopian fairy tales. Where is our Anais Nin? Our Hunter S. Thompson? I wanted to write raw, electric work with a free flowing mix of prose and poetry, explorations of sexual freedom, art, death and love. The name is just something I thought sounded cool and rebellious - the screaming skull outraged at contemporary society, that sort of thing.

Emma Strunk, is a baleful influence, haunting the inhabitants of a world given over to desperate experiences and unrestrained excesses. Moments of tenderness alternate with senseless violence as the human instincts become swamped with drugs and desperation. Emma is elusive, a personification of the cruelty in which these harried characters are trapped. It transpires that she may not even exist. The spirit of the night, so to speak. Emma Strunk is a novel written entirely in poems.