Notes: A change of venue.

This is Last Night I Dreamed I Was You, a new venture by Joe B. Wall, sharing stories, longer narratives (in serial form), and random pieces that would otherwise just hide out in the notebook.

I've always loved the serial format, and a formative moment in my young life came back in '86, when I was working in a strange little yellow-lit room with a window looking out on train tracks, in a job where I spent all day making microfiche and microfilm duplicates of crash reports from NTSB investigators studying the crash sites of airplanes, trains, ships, and cars. When I wasn't operating my unreliable Xidex D-80 microfiche duplicator or 16/35 roll diazo microfilm duplicator, I spent the rest of the day auditing duplicates of crash site photos, using a light table and an eye-loupe to meticulously verify that thousands of gruesome crash site photos matched the duplication masters, staring into the bloody vortex of what happens to the human body after hitting the ground at 400 miles an hour, or listening to cockpit voice recordings of flight crews struggling and failing to stay alive for eight hours a day.

What made it all palatable was the local Pacifica radio station, WPFW, down in the public end of the FM dial, and a daily program they'd do, in which a reader would read a book on the air, a chapter or so a day, over weeks or months.

I was enraptured, first by their reading of The Color Purple, complete with the queer parts of the narrative that were excised from the popular film adaption from 1985 in the rabid homophobia of the hater-eighties, but then even more so by a reading of Gloria Naylor's electric composite novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which tugged me along through so many feelings and so many moments, letting me hang in the room with indelible characters, and it made me start to work to take the little scraps of unfinished writing I'd been hammering out on my old Commodore 128 and make them into something I hoped would mean something.

I wrote on a variety of platforms as the internet was coming into being, but never seemed to build any momentum, except in the storytelling I did on small stages, until I signed onto Livejournal at the turn of the century and started to write like I was writing a column for an imaginary paper, advancing larger narratives every day or so, and I built up a small following that would readily show up when I announced a new set of stories for a stage show, but all that fell apart when the social media landscape went commercial.

I still have faith that new outlets can be fruitful, which is why I'm making a new start using the Ghost publishing platform (and notably avoiding Substack, which has a problem interfering with the "free speech" of horrible, ugly-hearted people who use the internet to hurt and foment more hurt, and can therefore fuck right off forever, thank you very much), in part as an experiment in rebuilding a following and in part to get me to finish a manuscript I've been stuck on for literal decades.

I'm optimistic. Please subscribe if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published! I promise not to spam you. I'm looking forward, even as I revisit some older material, and I have plenty of new tales to share, too.

—Joe