So…the other day I went for a walk, late afternoon, early grey settling in, everything looking grim and happy at the same time, wondering why I write, why would I, or anyone else, put words down on paper, for what bizarre, perverted, self-possessed reason would anyone give a damn what I have to say?

   Sun was low and dirty and I couldn’t help but notice the fall colors dancing around like it was all there in perfect symmetry, all reason and rhyme and beauty and magic, the orange and fading green and the deep deep red settling with all the time in the world.

   The air was crisp, my breath visible in clouds rushing out of my mouth, I bought some bubblegum at the corner store, watched the young hoods hanging out in small groups of indecision, (uncompromised compromises), walked slowly down the main strip hands in my pocket observing all I could, all the lost ideas and the beautiful moments and the street-corner babble carousing to the BANG-BANG beat of the moment. Cars raced by in flashes of silver fiberglass, leaves fell from the trees lazily in direct contrast to the animated urban scene, people either smiled or cried or just went about it all happily and beautifully, and there seemed to be an electricity flowing through everything, loose and wild and purposeful.

A homeless young fellow asked me for change…

A lady in an aquamarine skirt bopped up and down while crossing the street...

   A guy with long sideburns cigarette in his mouth helped a suburban couple with directions (oh yes, the Niakwa Building, it’s just down there, see that cross-street, Portage Avenue, yes, oh yes, just past Main Street, thank you thank you)…

  At a bus-stop a young street-girl smelling of booze and chemicals laid her head on my shoulder and began to cry as the bus pulled up and I climbed in it…

   Sometime later I hopped off the bus and landed in a residential neighborhood, large elm trees lining the avenue, golden leaves piled high in corners, kids playing in the drooping sunlight, and tricycles and cats and sand-boxes and green parks and dogs barking in the distance and old men hunched over on front porches and it continued…it continued…

   There was beauty, yes, there was ugly and downright painful as well, yes yes yes, but at that specific moment there seemed to be an understanding on my part, a cynical acceptance of things being the way they are, an absence of ranting and mad-dog raving, but a raving nonetheless, a quiet, serene almost Taoist doing-by-not-doing interaction with the outside world.

  I finally reached home, walked through the door tired and happy, and my wife was smiling lovely and beautiful and simply all there – she sat at the computer glass of white wine beside her and wrote and banged and the keyboard made a beautiful sound, and she laughed large and cocky and genuine and brown-eyed-knowing, and I realized, OH YEAH, all the back-alley-wonder loved and lost, all the golden autumn colors fading reluctantly into the night, all the sadness and beauty always present hungry and relentless, all the strangers that piss me off endlessly on any given day, all the simple handshakes and gorgeous early morning kisses,

this,

     all of this, 

                                old friend,

                          is

             why

        I

write. –

Tony Nesca


Author Bios:

Tony Nesca was born in Torino, Italy in 1965 and moved to Canada at the age of three. He was raised in Winnipeg but relocated back to Italy several times until finally settling in Winnipeg in 1980. He taught himself how to play guitar and formed an original rock band playing the local bars for several years. At the age of twenty-seven he traded his guitar for a Commodore 64 and started writing seriously. He has published six chapbooks of stories and poems (which he used to sell straight out of his knapsack at local dives and bookstores), six novels, three books of poetry and stories and has been an active contributor to the underground lit scene for ten years, being published in innumerable magazines both online and in print. He currently resides in Winnipeg and shares a house with his wife, his step-daughter, his teenage nephew and his mother. Tony’s blog

Nicole I-Nesca was born in Ohio. She developed a love of music, painting and writing early on and continued that love through out her adult life. While living in Canada, she completed her first three works of poetry and prose collected in the anthology piece, KAMIKAZE WHITE NOISE. She has been published in several E-Zines and has been a part of two anthologies. She and her husband, Tony Nesca, are the editors of the underground publishing company Screamin' Skull Press. She currently resides in Winnipeg and shares a house with her husband, her daughter, her teenage nephew and her mother-in-law.


Books:

Hobo is the sixth novel of underground writer Tony Nesca, a rambunctious, rebellious drunk-happy love story about a struggling writer who moonlights as a Night Watchman at a college located right in the middle of the ghetto. His wife is also a writer and together they publish their books and live a dual life of family and home with late night bohemian living, the whole time surrounded by an array of street-people, broke artists, and other fringe-dwellers. Sexually frank and charged with humor and desperation, Hobo is a unique work, a gritty celebration of life, love and individuality, written in Nesca’s classic free-flow-lyric, with words, ideas and sentences that go on for pages, alive and beautiful and unapologetic.


Kamikaze White Noise is a collection of three books by Nicole I. Nesca, The Sexual Repression Collection, Kink and Canned. Though not a formal trilogy, the books were written as companion pieces and follow the themes of sexual freedom, emotional frankness and street-carnival logic, all written with Nicole Nesca’s usual free-flowing sardonic wit. Kamikaze White Noise is prose and poetry that assaults the senses, liberates the mind and celebrates life on the edge like a perfect quarter-mile drag race.