#dean kostos

[revenge-of-the-assbutt]

20 Questions For Writers

Tagged by the lovely @mercurialkitty

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 10

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 61,854

3. What fandoms do you write for? Supernatural, Marvel (comics and MCU), Our Flag Means Death, Castle, 9-1-1, House MD, Psych, Malevolent Podcast, The Magnus Archives, Hermitcraft, Life Series, and Good Omens

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos? A Heart Of Iron, All I Want, What happens when superheroes and Twitter mix, Turning Page, and 3am Cookies

5. Do you respond to comments? I try, but I'm kinda scared to lol

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hasn't ended yet, but AHOI is definitely my angstiest fic

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? All I Want

8. Do you get hate on fics? Nope!

9. Do you write smut? Not yet, but I might if I get the right request

10. Do you write crossovers? Yup! :>

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not as as far as I know

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Nope

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Starting the Stream was originally gonna be co-written, but that fell through

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? Ooh, hard one. Probably Frostiron or Spideypool just because that's what I grew up

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? Starting the Stream

16. What are your writing strengths? I will go to extreme lengths to make it accurate. All of the Old Norse in AHOI has been translated as best I could into Old Norse via an Old Norse dictionary and then transfered into the runic alphabet

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Sticking to a wip other than AHOI

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? Only if I have a comprehensive online dictionary I can use and even then I only do dead languages that will be less jarring to readers if I get grammar wrong

19. First fandom you wrote for? I am very not proud of it but I wrote a (now orphaned) DSMP fic back in april 2022 that is one of the cringiest fics I have ever wrote

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? AHOI purely because of Kosto. I could go on for hours about his lore

Taglist (no pressure)

@fionaswhvre @shineforthee @babyblue-mind @outofbluecomesgreen2 @disabled-dean

@faithdeans @theresalwaysfanfiction

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

The Gwenn A. Nusbaum-WWBA Scholarship For Emerging Poets:

Walt Whitman Birthplace Association (WWBA) invites applications for the Gwenn A. Nusbaum-WWBA Scholarship.  The $1800 scholarship is offered in the spirit of Walt Whitman’s poem, “O Me! O Life!” He writes: “That you are here – that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

Applications are sought from those poets at the early stages of their careers, ages 25-35 years.  This scholarship, awarded every year, aims to encourage and assist an emerging poet in their creative poetry writing endeavors.  Their emerging poetry career should be of exceptional artistic quality and should demonstrate a passion for poetry, an awareness of the power of the poem, an originality of perspective and skillful use of expressive language.  They will be expected to produce additional strong work during the scholarship timeline of one year, July 1, 2024 – July 1, 2025.

The application is open January 1 – April 1, 2024.

There is no application fee. 

The winner will be notified May 20, 2024. 

An Award Ceremony will be held as a Zoom and/or at the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site, the last week in June 2024, date TBA.

The Scholarship is administered by WWBA.  The winner is selected by an independent and diverse panel of three (3) judges who may include, but are not limited to, poets, professors, scholars, writers and WWBA representatives. Past Panelists included Victoria Chang, Cornelius Eady, Juan Filipe Herrera, Jane Hirshfield, Dean Kostos, Molly Peacock, and WWBA representative Trustee Robert Savino. Panelists for 2024 include Kwame Dawes and Dorianne Laux.

[revenge-of-the-assbutt]

Last Line Tag

Warning: MAJOR spoilers for A Heart Of Iron chapter 34 and pretty much the rest of part 2 that has been posted

The last thing he saw was a bright yellow glow coming from Kosto, the other man having a bored, exasperated look on his face, as if he had lived this moment a million times before.

“Go to sleep, Tony. We can talk about this in the morning,” he said, and then everything went dark.

Tag list (no pressure)

@castielafflicted @bloodydeanwinchester @disabled-dean @deancodedinthewater @butch--dean @invisible-brandy @faithdeans @fionaswhvre @deepfriedtoast202 @winged-horrors

LAST LINE TAG

Closer." He whispers when their limbs are tangled around each other and their chests in a tight press. Eddie complies. They're going to sleep like this and then wake up in the morning together. This is how it's gonna be for the rest of their lives. Buck cannot wait.

This is actually the last line from my fic carved your name into my bedpost

Tags: @hippolotamus @cal-daisies-and-briars @revenge-of-the-assbutt @your-catfish-friend @spagheddiediaz @watchyourbuck @elgascreamslikehell @dreamforrest @adarkermiserablecrow @housewifebuck @buckleyobsessed @butchdiaz @fuckwadoftoiletpaper @buckleyobsessed @jamespearce @liabegins @femalemusketeer and anyone who wants to join 💕

[yespoetry]

A Review of Dean Kostos' ‘The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoir’

By Michael McKeown Bondhus

Early in Dean Kostos’s memoir of bullying and abuse, a childhood art teacher takes him and a couple of other kids out to the countryside to paint landscapes. In what’s clearly a formative moment, Kostos describes how his teacher complimented him on his “ability to find secret colors—a [farmhouse’s] rosy, ash-colored roof, which other students simply painted gray.” As it turns out, “finding secret colors” is a key to the book as a whole.

To describe The Boy Who Listened to Paintings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) as a memoir about trauma would be like describing the Mona Lisa as a painting of a woman—accurate, but oversimplified. It would also be reductive to describe it as a book about art’s redemptive potential. Given the book’s exquisite craft—its images, its motifs, its repetitions—it would be better to say that The Boy Who Listened to Paintings is, in its own way, a painting. And a poem. And a memoir.

It does not take long for the reader to be plunged into the depth of Kostos’s pain. Mercilessly bullied at school and trapped in the role of peacemaker between his feuding parents, he describes an adolescent suicide attempt that was disrupted by his hearing the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” playing on the radio. Lennon’s plaintive lyrics “All the lonely people” resonate with the teenaged Kostos, as they might with any marginalized person, but Kostos takes it beyond simple identification—“With the words of the song pouring into my ears, my mind thought beyond words. The music filled me the way watercolor drenches paper.” This type of lovely synesthesia pervades the book as he realizes that “one ally would be there when everything else abandoned me. Beauty: leaves shot through with veins. Beauty: a brush dripping with color. Beauty: light streaming from a painting. Beauty: a song keening from my radio. I decided to live.”

While his suicide attempt is undoubtedly one of the most poignant moments in the memoir, less immediately visible is Kostos’s oddly beautiful description of the neckties he had used to construct the noose: “Neckties. I had a dozen: striped, paisley.” There is nothing florid about this description and it could easily be overshadowed by his subsequent epiphany about beauty, yet something about the simple image and its poetic syntax resonates. Perhaps it’s because it is so characteristic of this young man to recognize style and pattern even in such a critical moment. Though some might see this as “glorifying pain,” the writer’s ability to draw beauty out of his suffering is what saves him time and again.

Kostos eventually has himself committed to the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital (known colloquially as “the Toot”)  to escape the extreme bullying he’s experiencing at boarding school. The bulk of the memoir is focused on his time in the Toot, the people he meets there, and his many encounters with “secret colors.” For example, one inmate Kostos encounters is the delightful Peggy, a patient he describes as “the clown lady” because of her orange wig and colorful bubblegum wrapper bracelets. Peggy comes across as something of an unconscious poet, describing snow falling into the Toot’s courtyard as “God’s dandruff falling jumbly from a tumble of white sky.”

In recalling events, Kostos shifts from Peggy’s observation to the following narration: “Many of us got up to admire the snow clinging to trees and houses…everything had been blanketed—immaculate, quiet. The therapist had us make snowflakes to decorate the ward with for the next holiday, Christmas.” Gently guiding us through three images—snow as dandruff, snow blanketing the earth, snowflake cutouts, Kostos reveals subtle gradations of white as if painting for the reader “a rosy, ash-colored roof, which other students simply painted gray.”  

A similarly well-crafted moment occurs later in the memoir. After experiencing a traumatic event involving one of his friends in the Toot, Kostos writes

I toweled off and walked to the ward for the first time that day. Reaching the dining room, I was silent. A blurry sensation pushed through my body. Everything got on my nerves: the dissonant sound of the TV and its canned laughter, somebody arguing with a nurse, the smell of greasy food. Dad’s words played in my head like a confusing static. After picking at a dinner roll, I drifted back to my room.

Again, the subtle art of these lines reminds the reader of Kostos’s background as an extensively published, award-winning poet. Quiet rolling r’s and softly hissing s’s pervade the passage as Kostos “drifts” between ward and room, dissociated, dully registering sounds and smells through a haze of grief. The near synesthesia of a “blurry sensation push[ing]” and “words like static” invokes both mental illness and his earlier observation that “colors had sounds and vice versa,” a discovery that allows for “a new way of seeing.” And it is, as this “new way of seeing” ultimately carries him through his dark nights of the soul.

Though there are many memoirs about abuse and trauma, what sets Kostos’s apart are its painterly and poetic sensibilities. While skimming The Boy Who Listened to Paintings to write this review, I found myself noticing motifs that I hadn’t on my first read. It was as if reading the book was akin to looking at a painting close-up, while skimming allowed me to step back and see how all the lines and brushstrokes worked together to create a deceptively simple whole. Not surprisingly, Kostos packs a lot of narrative and emotional content into this slim book, but by attuning their eyes (and ears) readers will also be strongly impacted by this wonderful memoir’s many “secret colors.”

Michael McKeown (formerly Charlie) Bondhus is an Irish-American writer. He's the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Copper Nickel. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (UK). He is associate professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College (NJ).  More at: http://charliebondhus.com.

[bgsqd]

Today at 5 @bgsqd Please join us for a reading by poets Dean Kostos and Alan Baxter in celebration of their recently published books: The Boy Who Listened To Paintings and A Second of Eternity. @deankostos (at Bureau of General Services-Queer Division) https://www.instagram.com/p/B32VXCZl5XH/?igshid=180tx2rgbioy0

[thingsweneed]

Tonight I’m having a conversation with Dean Kostos about his newest collection of poetry entitled: Pierced by Night-Colored Threads. October 5, 2017

Tonight I’m having a conversation with Dean Kostos about his newest collection of poetry entitled: Pierced by Night-Colored Threads. October 5, 2017

I can’t remember how we met or when we met but suffice it to say that I’ve known Dean Kostos for a good many years now. We’ve had many on-air conversations over the years and tonight’s program will be centered around his newest book of poetry: Pierced by Night-Colored Threads. But instead of me babbling about it here’s a snippet from a wonderful review by Ron Kolm in the on-line magazine,…

[podcastpalace]

09/14 WWE: Interview Special, Hyped Over Vince McMahon by CBS Sports Podcasts .... In an absolutely jam-packed episode, Brian Campbell and Adam Silverstein break down a tremendous week of WWE programming as Nick Kostos found himself on the wrong end of Hurricane Irma working on location in Connecticut. Don’t you worry, though, because Handsome Nick is still on this week’s podcast as he and BC unveil their string of entertaining and enlightening interviews with AJ Styles, Dean Ambrose, Finn Balor, The New Day, Kurt Angle and a bevy of other superstars two nights before SummerSlam (35:45). BC and The Silver King begin the show by looking at the feel spot-activating angle between Kevin Owens and Vince McMahon (4:35) and discussing a hot Raw that included the third edition of John Cena vs. Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman looking strong over both Cena and Brock Lesnar (12:50). The guys also break down the Mae Young Classic and Ronda Rousey’s future in WWE (23:00) before wrapping things up with PPV Rewind (1:20:11) and their weekly Feel Spots (1:31:55).

[otherdeb]

Book Review -- The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoir, by Dean Kostos

Book Review — The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoir, by Dean Kostos

I purchased The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoir directly from the author at a brunch we both attended. That said, you guys know that the following will be my honest, unvarnished opinion.

The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoiris a very compelling book. Kostos’ candid, heart-wrenching memoir really resonated with me for many reasons, not the least of which was the role art played in…

[embracinglilith]

http://www.alimentumjournal.com/a-cannibals-suicide-by-dean-ko/#.UftGipKG2zt

[thingsweneed]

Poet, Dean Kostos

[thingsweneed]

Tonight I’m having a conversation with Dean Kostos about his newest collection of poetry entitled: Pierced by Night-Colored Threads.  

Please tune in tonight at 7pm to my radio program Graffiti on Hellenic Public Radio, WNYE, 91.5 fm. Or listen on-line at the CosmosFM website.

CLICK HERE to check out my blog entry for this conversation at “Just My Eyes”.

[thingsweneed]

Two big events Sunday evening. 

First, catch my friend Anna Paidoussi in concert with many friends and admirers at 5pm at the Kefalos Society of America, 20-41 Steinway Street, Long Island City then rush home to hear me being interviewed on John McMullen’s podcast/radio show at 7pm.

For more information about Anna’s concert call 718-545-4900.

To find where you can listen to John McMullen’s program CLICK HERE.

My show tonight on HPR/Cosmosfm has been hijacked by my good friend and radio colleague, Anthoula Katsimatides. I’ll be back on the air next Thursday night—October 5—to have a conversation with the poet, Dean Kostos about his newest book of poetry, Pierced by Night-Colored Threads.

[bgsqd]

Looking forward to hosting Judy Grahn on Thursday night along with t'ai freedom ford, Celeste Gainey, Dean Kostos, Heather Aimee O'Neill, and Jason Schneiderman! (at Bureau of General Services-Queer Division)