Nola Studiola is one year old today. Happy birthday!

In the world of  marriage, one year has traditionally been celebrated with paper.

Here at Nola Studiola, we will celebrate one year old-ness with our first ever exclusive audio interview, to be posted this weekend, about marriage’s failings, and the brave man who dared write about it.

Why Ponteri, author of the essay/memoir Wedlocked (Hawthorne Press, 2013) for our first audio exclusive? Because he is a writer who does not hide the process of creation. He does not hide himself by shoe-horning his edges into a structure, nor does he shy away from the backside of that embroidery called ‘essay.’

We were most pleased with each other when we were fucking very, very hard, at least it seemed that way to me . This hard fucking (silly phrase) seemed to emanate and express our mutual anger, her pissed off at me for rejecting her again and again and me angry because she was not a figment but an actual woman whom I didn’t know how to relate to or how to touch, my dear, pissed-off wife pulling me into her harder and saying, —Fuck me harder and me pummeling her harder and faster as if we could fully express our anger . Writing that gives me a little hard-on. -from Wedlocked

The un-paragraph; the expansive. Ponteri weaves physical, literary, musical and personal references as he builds a structure out of a story of desire and marriage. In Wedlocked, Ponteri engages in an honest wrestle to be true to oneself within form on the page, as David Shields says in Ponteri’s 2010 interview with him in Tin House: “I marry the self, through braided collage gestures, to the cultural warp and woof.”

Stop by tomorrow for the interview, do.

And Happy Birthday, Nola Studiola! Let’s get this baby a drink, preferably a Vieux Carre. If you don’t have it on hand, rye whiskey, neat, will suffice.

Cheers!