Friday, September 5^th, 2025 will mark the release of Ultramarine, a literary/musical collaboration with my chamber group, The Plaster Cramp. Equal parts meditation on the ineffable might of nature and the narrator’s upbringing off the grid, Ultramarine will be available as a 12” vinyl LP (with artwork by Dean C. Thornton) accompanied by a 44-page perfect-bound book containing the titular short story (with interior art by the late Ernest Haskell).

There will be only one pressing of this record. As such, pre-orders need to be in by Friday, July 18^th.

• For US and International orders, please visit our Bandcamp page.
• For US orders only, you can use Square to get either the LP+book or just the book.
• For other payment means and/or alternate considerations (check, Venmo, etc.), simply click the Contact link and we’ll work out the details.

The LP+book is $45 postage paid. The standalone book is $17 postage paid. Both come with downloads of all digital media.

Also, Bandcamp will be hosting a live, online Listening Party at 7PM Eastern on Thursday, July 17^th (the night before pre-orders are due) where you can preview the album in its entirety. In the meantime, you can listen to the first single, “Judas Canoe.”

Thank you so much for listening and for reading. For independent, fringe projects like this, word of mouth is invaluable: please share with anyone who you think might be interested.

Published by Fomite Press and available for purchase in softcover and e-book from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.

It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia—until she encounters the breakdowns and disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected.

Set in a semi-fictional, post-industrial American warzone, this novel explores multiple facets related to the recent nonfictional decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amid a time of constant violence and change. Despite its heavy themes, the narrative is threaded throughout with veins of absurdist humor that invite and welcome us into the familial warmth of the narrator’s memories of friendship. 

Published by West Virginia University Press on September 1st, 2024. Available for pre-order now.

Often compared to soundtrack music for films that have never been made, The Plaster Cramp is a cross-genre collaboration I’ve been engaged in for several years with member’s of The b.l.a.c.k. Lodge Brass Band. I typically describe what we do as some form of chamber jazz, but we’re just as much influenced by math rock, folk traditions, and the history of electronic music (from Stockhausen to Regan Farquhar). Which ultimately makes us a pretty strange band. Yet of all the musical projects I’ve attempted throughout my life, this is the first one that strangers seem to actually enjoying listening to. This strikes me as a particular metric for success.

Which is why we’ve decided to attempt an experiment and release our eighth record, Soma, as a limited-edition vinyl LP (our previous recordings were digital-only releases). Alternating between spacious meditations and percussive expeditions, the eleven songs of Soma operate as a non-verbal internal dialogue, improvisations balanced by tight compositions and awash all over with environmental samples of wind and water and laughter. Dean Thornton is currently assembling the artwork, and we’re working with Little Elephant Custom Vinyl, one of the best small-batch record makers in the country. We hope to have records in folks’ hands by October 27th, 2023. In order for that to happen, though, we need to collect pre-orders now.

If this sounds like a fun or enticing prospect, click here to pre-order a copy of Soma by the Plaster Cramp for $40 USD (postage included for US orders). You can also purchase the record through our Bandcamp page (this is especially useful for international orders), or pre-save the songs on the streaming service of your choice (they’ll be added to your library automatically on release day).

Pre-orders need to be made no later than August 22nd, 2023. There will likely not be a second pressing of the record after this date.

A little more info on the composition of Soma:

No poetry.

No abstractions.

I’m tired.

My bones hurt and my head is foggy and this associative chain of memories keeps cycling back to some of the folks who have meant the most to me throughout my life—Joshua, Glen, H., so many others—and to whom I can never speak again, touch again, laugh with or sleep beside again. They are gone, some more mysteriously than others. But I’m still here.

From the very start, death’s sorrowful hand has defined my life (my mother was convinced I was the reincarnation of my brother Daniel: try growing up “normal” with that as the opening lines to your tragic backstory). The way I listen, the stiffness in my gait, how I respond to the sight of something light adrift on a morning thermal: everything about me is somehow informed by loss, and it’s exhausting. I’m tired of the loving part of me being so constantly, irreversibly bound to death. Tired of and tired by. Like a leafless vine fed on sour milk, reaching for something high above, something close to where the light shines through: my roots will never not be sown through the fertile soil, black with worm castings and moldering leaves.

So much for no poetry. Too tired to stick to my own arbitrary rules. Glen would playfully mock me for this. H. wouldn’t give a shit either way. I don’t know how Josh would react because he died when we were still both so young, barely in school: all I really remember is his laughter and his curling locks and how one time we were racing through his grandparents’ kitchen and somehow knocked over an extension ladder (why was there a ladder in the kitchen?), how it came down hard and fast on my bare foot and blackened my big toenail which, in a few days, would terrifyingly fall off. Who else alive knows this story? I’m too tired to answer my own questions.

Somehow, this all equals eleven songs etched in black lacquer. Songs written through the cipher of my worn-down corpus. Songs capturing the listless fatigue stitched through the endless prayer of remembering. Songs embodying an exuberance I wish I could hold and make real. Songs of incidental beauty when I remember not everyone I love is dead. Songs I can write yet only others can perform.

The personnel for Soma are Dead Charlie (reeds, bass recorder, arrangement, contrabass, percussion), Pella (piano, vibraphone, keyboards, arrangement, viola, horns), Ants (horns), Kes (percussion, marimba, kalimba, horns), T (cello, percussion, alto trumpet), and Lawrence (drums, percussion, horns, broken air organ), with me providing composition, arrangement, production, electronics, and keyboards. Field recordings provided by Scott Sell, as well as klankbeeld and Benboncan at freesound.org. All artwork done in collaboration with Dean C. Thornton, who also was indispensable in making all these varied pieces come together as a whole.

As always, thank you so much for reading and for listening. None of these things would be possible without you.

In the usual tidal-bore cycle that dominates my public life as an artist, nearly all of the stories that I published in 2022 were released over just a few weeks in November and December. A few more pieces might actually get published before year’s ends, but now seemed a good time to share the news with interested parties. Which leads us now to this pithy list:

• “Cake of the Earth” in Canada’s Hermine, a wonderful journal who just last year published my escape-fantasy “Pop & Freedom.” Told in the voice of one of my favorite recurring characters, “Cake of the Earth”—the first of my pandemic-era writings to be featured in a literary journal—is about as close to a teenage love story as I’ve likely written yet.
• “Robinia” in Ireland’s Channel, a publication focused on nature’s complex relationship with humans. Also a repeat venue for me (they published last year’s “Growth Unencumbered”), the people at Channel have shown me a lot of love and been such great editorial collaborators. This, too, is a pandemic-era story, one wherein I get to exercise a little bit of my own personal fantasizing, about something I should have done but couldn’t do for my mother many years ago.
• “Of Age(Caprice)” in Honk Kong’s The Bureau Dispatch. This is a new journal for me, but I really enjoyed working with them to bring this story (and its accompanying dossier) to print. If you can believe it, this one’s actually a Christmas story.

Hermine and Channel are both print journals, so you’ll have to purchase copies in order to read the stories. The Bureau Dispatch, though, is online and free.

In related news, my post-jazz chamber group The Plaster Cramp has a new record out called Wax-Eater. While the album has been available as a digital download from Bandcamp for a couple weeks now, today marks its streaming release on pretty near any platform you can think of (including Spotify, AppleMusic, iTunes, YouTube, and many more). It was a difficult year for me to compose new music—indeed, a difficult year to compose much of anything aside from improvised songs sung at my animal cohabitants, who did not appreciate my efforts one bit—so this record feels especially important to me. I hope you find its range of sounds and textures intriguing.

And that’s it! As always, thank you for reading, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. None of what I do would mean anything without you.

—Douglas W. Milliken

by guest contributor Patrick Kiley

[For this third episode in the ongoing review/response sequence composed by collaborators and friends, Patrick Kiley takes the time to swim through the emotional and environmental nuances of “Growth Unencumbered,” a short story I wrote while a guest of writer Carl Skoggard and artist Joseph Holtzman at their country home in Valatie, New York. For two weeks in November 2019, I stayed in a refurbished farmhouse on the edge of their property, spending most mornings in the expansive studio addition working on new drafts while periodically looking out the east windows to observe, as the dark slowly eased into dawn, the crepuscular activities of a family of cranky ducks who claimed the nearby pond as their home. (In actual fact, I would never have met Carl and Joe if not for Patrick, who—through his press PS Hudson/Pilot Editions—has published several books by both Carl and me: in a sense, “Growth Unencumbered” very much owes its existence to the ever-reaching connective tissue expanding outward from the kinda-gross-but-ultimately-loving heart of Patrick Kiley.) It was an incredibly important two weeks for me, as an artist and as a human. Partly inspired by S. B. Walker’s Walden series of documentary photographs, “Growth Unencumbered”—originally printed in Issue 4 of the Irish journal The Channel in the spring of 2021—is the first published piece from the body of work I composed while in Valatie. Without the confluence of all these things—the house, the landscape, the photographs, the friendships—I never would have written this story. There’d have been no story to write. — DWM]

Two people go on a walk in some woods to a place that’s special to them. Previously, one of them suffered a wound to his arm which necessitated amputation. Negligence played a role in this accident and left room for shame to creep in. The amputee loves the woman he’s walking with. At the very least, it seems like today things will be okay. But a small, dark revelation bubbles up from the calm of the hampered narrator’s wincing self-reflection. It’s a moment of brutal honesty that, depending on the reader, may provoke a sense of justified revulsion or an irresistible pang of empathy. This is one possible reading of “Growth Unencumbered.”

Reading a story by Douglas W. Milliken is itself like taking a walk—along a shaky ledge above a beautiful coastline. For one thing, you’re often outside in his fiction, and the environment is always sharply drawn. But it’s no postcard. There’s a sense of menace just underfoot. The ground could—and will—give at any moment, but you need to keep walking if you want to see something you haven’t seen before. This is just to say, you never really “settle in” to one of Milliken’s stories—you only ride its edge.

Milliken’s signatures are all over “Growth Unencumbered” almost like olfactory traces: a skunk’s thiol sprayed across a cold boulder last night with a blush of spring violets blown over it this morning. Let me try to bring that home. Mildly rueful self-effacing wisdom and bare honesty that’s so vulnerable it’s almost funny: “I always knew I’d live long enough to see my body fall apart, but still, I never thought I’d see the parts actually shed like leaves from an autumn tree.”

Bitter as almond skin, but who wouldn’t want a nibble?

I’ll admit it: I’m a friend of Doug’s. And when I read his work, even a relatively-short short story like “Growth Unencumbered,” the language in my mind starts sounding like the words on his page. Raw sense saturates common sense. A little sympathetic nimbus grows up and out of my atlas. Every writer casts some kind of shadow with the way they write, and Doug’s sits with me like an alter ego even after I stop reading. This obscure figure starts to direct my attention to little things outside like dead wood and creeping vines, and to the inevitable little battles they’re suffering through in unseen pockets of spacetime. Mice who think they’re people, weeds that have accepted their lot. He also has me look up little known technical names for flora, for tools, for ailments, and for parts of anatomy that don’t stand out as much in their everyday idiom. Milliken’s language is always generous, mixing the profane with the precision-guided. So, for example, the names of human anatomy—humerus, condyle (“an articular prominence of a bone”) are rendered right alongside the imagined parlance of trees: “Wow! Yeah! I’m a tree! Woo-hoo!”. 

If I sit back and enjoy the company, I feel like I’m swimming through the story’s as-yet uncomposed penumbral postlude. 

Speaking of shadows, does the title itself send a little shiver down your spine, too? No one wants to hear about a growth. What’s this about an encumbrance undone? The words, for me, signal cancer, an uncontrollable proliferation. Milliken’s titles never give too much away and always leave a wide valence for interpretation. I think he wouldn’t be unhappy to know his words gave me pause. Why shouldn’t they?

Another signature of Milliken’s work is the revelation of the past in small details offered well into his stories, like stubbing your toe on a fossilized bone along the ledge you took to be uninhabited. Part way through “Growth Unencumbered,” after easing into the landscape where the story’s main action happens, we’re hit with a tiny declarative paragraph that pierces the veil of a pristine here and now: “That friend’s gone now. So’s his uncle’s house. So’s the magnificent Leonberger. Should anyone be surprised by that?” This is a small, startling crumble in the metaphorical ledge. As the reader proceeds from this moment, more infill from the past gradually pours into the present that we took to be an untouchable immanence, sufficient in itself, all there is. But it’s not. Every body has a phantom limb. As we accompany the characters along their trail we move transcendentally and sometimes painfully through the mystery of their lives, and ours.

Patrick Kiley is a publisher, writer, father, and make-believe-wooden-dead-guy perpetually haunting the capital region of New York’s Hudson River.

Thus spake Open Mike Eagle in his hurts-so-good anthem “Dark Comedy Late Show,” and man, what a fun line to say aloud and even better sentiment to feel. So while the finishing touches are being applied to the next installment of Friends Saying Nice Things About My Art, here’s a brief intermission to mention that my essay “Anyone Can Have a Good Time” is a finalist for a Maine Literary Award for short nonfiction. The story—an extended meditation on my evolving relationship with my mother before, during, and after her death—was published late last year in Shenandoah, where you can read it for free online along with an accompanying interview.

The Maine Literary Awards are held annually to recognize excellence in the Maine writing community and are conducted by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Winners will be announced during the award ceremony on May 24th at SPACE in Portland, Maine.

by guest contributor Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson

[For the second installment in this series of responses composed by collaborators and friends, Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson engages in an associative/expressionistic meditation on “Reuptake,” the opening track to Blind Pelican’s Let the Sun Take the Blame (as well as a corresponding namesake single), a song I wrote pre-pandemic about the dissonance emergent from missing people who I might never see again while simultaneously experiencing the low-grade animal bliss of sunlight warm against my body. (Perhaps fittingly, the choruses are sung by Ben Trickey, songwriting extraordinaire and ages-old friend who I have not seen in more years than I care to count.) Given that Genevieve is my long-time domestic- and creative-partner, it probably comes as no surprise that she had a hand in composing this song (in fact, one of Genevieve’s early vocal melodies from “Reuptake” was later reinterpreted by The Plaster Cramp as “Pella’s V. Occultation,” Genevieve being the eponymous V. cited in so many Plaster Cramp titles). It was an immense pleasure working with Genevieve on this/these song(s), and doubly so to observe and assist as she composed this response that is very much shaped by the iconography of our home, from the gardens we’ve planted to our nests on the sun porch to the nose-to-nose half-asleep silence that speaks stronger of affection than any known words. — DWM]

It’s too cold and too early to write this on the sun porch as I’d intended. So I found a sunbeam in our bedroom to curl up in, 12 feet above and 12 feet behind the corner of the house I think of when I hear “Reuptake.” But conditions are similar. The snowmelt off the roof keeps catching my eye. We got an inch or two of snow last night that likely won’t make it through the afternoon. The sun is getting stronger each day.

This week I’ll start seeds in the basement beneath the UV glow of a grow lamp and by the end of the month, I’ll bring them up to live on the sun porch, introduce their cotyledons to a second kind of light. These three walls of glass will heat the room up into the mid-80s on sunny days and in the evenings we hope it will hold in the upper-40s. I’ll put heat mats under the more tender starts to keep them from dropping below 60. 

I catch sight of the witch hazel through the melt-splashed panes of glass, scraggly neon yellow petals held by burgundy bracts on a twisting shrub that has been broken and taped back together how many times now? Until we planted it here. In the circle garden. At our home at the corner of Central and Nye. It reaches out no higher than two feet, a wide Y stretching where it can. This year it bloomed on February 4th. January 31st last year. January 26th before that. This harbinger of life seemingly out of synch with the rest of the garden. It pulled me out this year. Remember how I was searching for the first signs of a bud opening at the end of January? You would tell me it was coming. And we would check again in the mornings. When the first petal weaseled itself out of the barely separating bud, I called it. 

—“It bloomed!”

—“It’s blooming,” you reminded me. 

And the light got a little stronger each day. 

And after pruning in the orchard, we catnapped on the sun porch until the sun dipped behind Cindy’s house kitty-corner from our own, nuzzling into each other until it was too cold to bear then herding the cat back inside to close down the porch for the night. 

Even without my glasses on, I can see the girdles and thick bark-scars on the witch hazel from its previous lives on Brackett Street and at the Black Lodge. And I can see, too, a haze of color against the snow punctuated by the rhythm of melt past the window. Electric yellow unfolding from burgundy. A snippet of glorious life in mud season.

Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson weaves together education and agroecology with art and design. She curates multi-genre events, leads intergenerational play programs, and creates meals that evoke deep conversations. Sometimes she stitches tiny pants for tiny people. Sometimes she makes infinitesimal donuts with friends. And sometimes she tends a subterranean garden with her house spouse.

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You can find more music by Blind Pelican on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and most anywhere else you enjoy streaming and downloading independent music.

by guest contributor Anne Buckwalter

[Expository note: given that writing fiction has become, for me, a truly alarming struggle during these pandemic years, the act of writing promotional/acknowledgement material for my recent publications (and other creative endeavors) has become well-nigh impossible. To counter this (with any luck temporary) linguistic enervation, I have enlisted the aid of some of my most beloved and talented friends to act as my hype-people while I rekindle my spirit and relearn how to write. The first installment in this series is provided by the artist and writer Anne Buckwalter, a dear friend, a generous spirit, and an absolute genius in the realm of subtle detail. Her paintings catch my breath and her stories stop my heart. I am so honored for her words, words I now get to share with you without any further preamble.— DWM]

I grew up in a family of woodcarvers. My dad carves uncannily realistic ducks and birds, and his dad was a master decoy carver and cuckoo-clock repairman. I didn’t inherit their talents — I can barely put together a basic shelf, let alone a convincing avocet — but I like the idea of bending a hard, unforgivable material into something supple and suffused with life. Such is the feat of Douglas W. Milliken’s small and spirited wooden carvings, referred to by the artist as dendroforms.

I had to google this word. The prefix dendro means tree-like, meaning the wooden objects are effectively self-referential, though they bear no resemblance to the form of an archetypical tree. Instead, they take on anima-imbued shapes that are not quite animal in the anthropomorphic sense, but nevertheless seem to have the capacity for life. The forms communicate a history of long existence, as if they are remnants or talismans from another time. Perhaps this is because they arrived to my apartment in Philadelphia carefully packed with descriptive cards explaining the material (all of the wood was sourced from local areas near Milliken’s home in Maine), the stain (all natural dyes, such as red wine, aronia berries, or black tea), and the finish (beeswax, linseed oil, etc) and a small drawing of each one— silhouettes ranging from long and sinewy (the Adrian Brody of the group, as I referred to it) to short and stocky (the George Costanza).

Trying to match each form to its correlating description felt like an exercise in species classification, and I wondered as I matched how critical this task was to interpreting the objects from an aesthetic perspective.

Very critical, I believe. As any other hopeless weirdo who also attended six-plus years of art school can attest, the context in which a work is experienced is as important as the work itself. Rather than seeing these objects on a shelf or in a vitrine in a white-cube gallery, they were delivered to my home where I could touch them, read about their origins, delight in their idiosyncrasies, experience their symbolic and literal weight (the former much heavier and the latter much lighter than I had anticipated). I moved them around my kitchen table like the pieces to a haunted prehistoric board game, I caressed them like the worry-stones I used to carry around as a kid, I played with them like toys, smelled them, I attributed them personalities (The Professor, The Athlete, The Drag Queen) and chose favorites. Within an hour of them being in my possession, they had become strangely intertwined with my own history, my own lost childhood.

Whether or not this intimate exchange was all part of Milliken’s intent is unknown, and arguably irrelevant. This is why the digestion of art is a dialogue rather than a monologue: what the artist means for one to get out of the work must be simultaneously considered as a vital component and disregarded altogether. However, having both read Milliken’s stories and heard his music, the dendroforms seem to me to be spiritual siblings to his other creative endeavors, and all three are inextricably connected by a unifying, weathered thread: the coexistence of roughness and smoothness, an unpredictable sharp edge or twisted knot on an otherwise soft plain. This effortless contradiction, to me, is an ultimate strength of all of Milliken’s work, and his wooden forms are no exception. Though I might find myself endeared to their physical qualities, they are much more than that — not simply charming playthings, but hard proof of life, personal relics, not trying to exist as anything but what they are.

Though disparate in appearance and utility, it is easy to love Milliken’s carvings with the same tenderness I love my dad’s shorebird carvings. I have a shelf of my dad’s birds in my kitchen, and I set one of the butterfly pea flower tea-stained dendroforms between a least sandpiper and a mallard. Where the bird carvings play their tricks on me, wanting me to believe that tiny hearts beat inside their breasts and they could at any point fly away, the small, smooth lump of wood between them pulled no punches, told no lies. The opposite of a decoy. Not alluding to life, per se, but still full of it.

Anne Buckwalter is a painter and writer currently based in Philadelphia. Her creative practice explores female identity and the coexistence of contradictory elements. Inspired by the folk art traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, her work arranges disparate objects in mysterious rooms and ambiguous spaces. By imagining obscure narratives that embrace paradoxes, her paintings delve into questions about the female body, intimacy, and gender roles. You can find her work at www.annebuckwalter.com.

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To see more examples of dendroforms, as well as other occasional documentation of my life in art, consider following my Instagram @douglaswmilliken. You can also direct queries there, or through the Contact form on this page.