Reading at The Current Year: Jon Konrath, John L. Sheppard, Michael Stutz

On Friday, June 20, 2025, The Current Year hosted a reading of three writers who have been living and working online since the last century.

I read some haikai by Basho: a translation by RH Blyth, another by Allen Ginsberg, and several recent translations of my own. I also read a partial draft of a new unpublished work, “Gulf of America,” and an excerpt from Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age.

John L. Sheppard, US Army veteran and author of a big long shelf of books, read from his bona fide cult classic, Small Town Punk. Taking place in the 80s, written in the 90s, self-published in the first wave of print-on-demand technology in 2001, and later picked up by a small press, the book introduces a cast of indelible characters who later return in the prequel, Latch Key Kids.

Jon Konrath, event headliner, is a writer whose devoted cult following have propagated years of memes, iconography and insider cant revolving around the hilarious but flat-out insanity of his wrangled dream-fever prose, the blendered absurdist mash that is recognizable anywhere and everywhere and is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is twisted, unreal, absurd, and totally haywire. His style and approach predates LLMs, Markov chain prose generators, and social media pseudo-anons, and has now cemented a place as the first beacon of post-AI literature.

All of these writers were on the net back before most people knew there was a net. Online space and the technology that makes it—the net, the internet, the capital-I “Internet”—are at various times a preoccupation of these writers, or at least a thing they’ve known and lived with well before it made the mainstream, or was branded as a “culture.”

They did dialup and Usenet and they maneuvered through shells. They’ve emailed every day for decades. And the combined texts of their email correspondence to each other, reaching back to the 90s, tallies up to over twenty million words. Where suddenly now it’s trendy to have an “Internet novel” or to look at the net as the public sphere and finished space, these are writers who were there and documented it in realtime.

The video was broadcast live for 45 minutes, stopping before the finish of Konrath’s reading. Konrath ended with an emotional reading of the final pages of Decision Paralysis.

The Current Year created and maintains an active Substack Wall, and as part of its mission, continues to promote and celebrate writers and artists of our time.

Thank you to everyone who attended or tuned into the live broadcast!