Book Announcement & The Terrors of Self-Promotion plus talking about Pianos, Punchlines, and something known as an Aufguss Towel Dance with Robin Cline

Hi!

Some good new! My book of poems and short prose: Lacquer is a Thrilling Word, is now available for pre-order! To get your copy or copies go to this link: Finishing Line Press or use the QR code below. Please don’t wait until the book is released as smaller presses use pre-sale funds to pay for the book’s printing, marketing, and distribution.

And here is how I’m feeling about promoting the book:

I tell myself: Self-promotion is horrible, scary, and embarrassing. I say, Barrie, you are much, much, much too weird. It’s as if your co-worker got a raise, a bonus, and new job title and then asked you how your employee review went and you say, “Oh, I got promoted too, but I had to do it myself.” They’d say, “Yeah, that’s not a thing.” Also, Barrie, the title is so stupid. Lacquer is a Thrilling Word? What were you even thinking? Who cares if lacquer is most definitely a thrilling word with its c and q side by side like a wildly successful collaboration among neighbors? Who cares if lacquer speaks in layers of raincoats all the while rendering gleam? Who cares if sonically, the word sounds like something is lacking, when in reality. the exact opposite is happening? And who cares if lacquer relishes in its own versatility, serving as both a noun and a verb: (they lacquered with lacquer) Well, that would be me, but it would probably be wise to keep such delights to myself.

I ask:

Self Ocean or Self Promotion?

Answer: Self Ocean.

Still…

This is what I want you to know:

I hope you experience my book as an enjoyable, sensation-producing rectangle.

I hope it makes you woozy in the best kind of way.

I hope you find it inventive and full of verve.

I hope you describe it as a whole different ball of wax, but one that you would keep, should you, of course, be in the market for such a ball.

Here’s what poet Alison Luterman (Hard Listening) says: To enter the pages of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is to walk inside the wild and wonderful, kaleidoscopically shape-shifting mind of Barrie Cole, appreciating an odd truth bomb here, a moment of delight or humor there, and now and again a totally unexpected light ray of divine wisdom shooting through a dusty stained-glass window that was somehow exported from an ancient Gothic cathedral to a grocery store in downtown Chicago. There are too many delightful lines to quote in a blurb, but let’s just say that she had me at “I am still a good person if I have had an unfortunate haircut, the kind where there are bangs of insanity, the kind wherein cutting more could not even begin to improve it, a haircut that makes purchasing a wig a genuine consideration and I am still a good person if I paid the bill late and I was too anxious to attend the party and too anxious to say hello to the neighbor and so pretended not to see her at all and this was no surprise, because I do this more than I do not, but I am still good. Probably.” I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.”

Words are Birds Podcast:

I’ve recorded 5 podcasts in which I have 3 short conversations with an interesting person. We each choose 5 topics we’d like to discuss and then let a randomizer application choose 3 from the list. Then, in part 2: I read something they’ve written and they read something I’ve written. This one is with artist, performer, writer, and Neighbor-Space director Robin Cline. I hope you enjoy it and please let me know, if you’d like to appear on a future episode.

And here is the poem from Lacquer is a Thrilling Word which Robin read:

The Cardboard Piano
I’d inherited my Grandpa’s piano
a solid upright, with various
marks and indentations on its skin,
its wood that is-itself.
Perhaps the piano had
grown bored in the basement
where it lived in solitary
confinement, unplayed
for years.
My husband and I set about
hiring piano movers.
This was before the divorce
My God, the kids were still babies
The staircase to our floor
was steep, narrow too
People were always hitting
their heads on the ceiling
It was single file only,
never two at a time
The piano movers told us
they weren’t optimistic
about making it work
so they’d have to practice first
using a cutout cardboard piano
It would be like a dress pattern.
It would be like a dress rehearsal too
Two dresses
When they brought over the cardboard
piano, I almost applauded.
It had scratchy music like a push
broom sweeping a sidewalk
like squirrels on a roof, all
pitterpatter &hurry.
It was a sandpaper, treebark,
pingpong, sawdust quartet.
They worked out just how it
would go up the stairs, turn at the
corners, and make it over to
the spot where we wanted it.
They pretended the cardboard
piano was heavy-for practice
but still they whispered.
Not a yell, not one grunt.
The next week, when they came back
with the real piano, I took the kids
to the park straight away. I knew
heavy was heavy.
We didn’t need to see the real struggle up:
The heaving, the bearing of so much weight.
There’d be enough struggling later,
for all of us.

Special Workshops this Month:

2 New Free Workshops in January :

1. How to Use Randomization to Do the Stuff You Need and Want to Do

When: Saturday 1/24/26 & 1/31/26 at 11 a.m. (Come to one or both)

Description: It’s always been difficult for me to do things in any kind of prescribed order, especially super boring things like getting health insurance, or scary things like starting a newsletter, but by using various randomization tools, everything is much easier. Randomization is how I’ve been able to write over a dozen plays, have a pretty clean house, and cope with overwhelm. Calling procrastinators,ADHD -havers, depression-sufferers, and weirdos, this might be just the thing for you.

2. Randomized Writing Prompts Workshop

Free Workshop 1/24/26- 1-3 p.m. CST.

Description: I have a list of over 300 simple prompts that I will randomize. We’ll respond to the prompts along with opportunities to read some of your writing;

Everyone welcome. No need to sign up, just show up.

https://us06web.zoom.us/my/barriecole...

passcode: writing

Finally, I’ve spent the last week in Seaside, Oregon attending Pacific University’s residency writers conference. I attended lecture after lecture as well as workshops with master poets like Dorianne Laux, Ellen Bass, Mahtem Shiferraw, Joeseph Millar, and Chris Abani and others. I will leave with more tools, ideas, and drafts of poems, but also a solid conviction (and it was pretty solid already, but today it's feeling unsmashable) that art matters. Words matter. Books matter. Stories matter. Theater matters. Songs matter. Poems matter. For Real. Art is serious, not frivolous. It is not in bad taste to speak of it, marinate in it, to transmit through it, and to be changed by it again and again. In the face of rising fascism and violence we need more art not less so that we might cope, laugh, cry, find our way, understand, reconfigure, come together, assist, fight, care and hold on to as well as expand our collective humanity.