In 2002, photographer David Wilcox shot this picture of an old typewriter he stumbled across in an abandoned factory building in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence. The publisher agreed to use it as the cover image of my first book of stories, Something Grand.
Here is a link to the paperback on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Something-Grand-John-Flynn/dp/0967824222
Years later, long after the paperback went out of print, it was re-released as an E-book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Something-Grand-John-Flynn-ebook/dp/B008RYZ164
For the E-book cover, I used a photo I'd taken in 2004 of an art installation in Manhattan's Bryant Park that featured cage upon cage full of manual typewriters.
When David Wilcox and I met, he was the manager and the photo-finisher of a Sprint franchise lab on Weybosset Avenue in Providence. I lived a couple blocks away, stopped in often, and we became fast friends.
Together, we knocked about Providence, day and night, taking photos, experimenting with different cameras and film speeds. We had access to a darkroom for black and white images, and all the Sprint equipment for processing color negatives and prints.
Here are eight images I shot, and that Dave processed and printed.
What the Something Grand collection features is the first short story I ever published, The Tire, which appeared in Aldeberan magazine in 1980.
This title story earned an award in 1990 from the HG Roberts Foundation of Kansas State University.
The book's back cover image, seen above, was taken on a London rooftop by Rick Corbo.
Inspiration for the photo came after the night Rick and I viewed the midnight showing of a film by David Lynch: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead
It was screened in the Odeon, Kensington, (I could be wrong) where we sat in the balcony and audience members could drink and smoke. We enjoyed a potent contact high as other moviegoers downed their pints, smoked their fags and shared their reefers while being transmogrified by Eraserhead for the first time.
Inspired by Lynch's story about Henry, raving about it, we walked London streets back to our rooming house flat at four in the morning, hatching a plan to sneak up to the rooftop so Rick could try his hand at creating some urban black and white imagery. Little did I know that 22 years later I'd find the photo in a shoebox, scan it and decide to use it.
We were entranced by Lynch's bizarrely comedic take on isolation and alienation, his use of eerie ambient noises and a black and white photography that was austere, poetic, surreal and dreadful in the way it captured a hellish yet fascinating urban industrial landscape. https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article-abstract/2/1/52/116593/Beautiful-If-You-See-It-the-Right-Way-David-Lynch?redirectedFrom=fulltext
This led to my discovery of Charles Sheeler, one of the artists who inspired my early stabs at short fiction: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edph/hd_edph.htm
Charles Sheeler, below.
That was quite a time for Rick Corbo. A few weeks later he met one of his heroes, Frank
Oz, one of the original creators of The Muppets.
The meeting happened in the lobby during a break between acts of the premiere at
London's National Theatre of Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.
Below, London's National Theatre at night.
Rick was so chuffed that he convinced Mr. Oz to meet with him and later that week they had a cup of coffee together. During that same period, Rick crossed paths with Orson Welles who, like Mr. Oz, was in London to film or perhaps promote (I never really knew) the second Muppet movie. Unfortunately, Rick and Orson never had coffee together.
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