Click on the “CLICK HERE TO ORDER NOW” button to the left of this message to purchase the new release. The audiobooks are available and will be mailed out the same day we get your order. The descriptions on the shopping cart were written two years ago and are being updated. The email address listed officially on this site is being updated to this new email address: <ddomench@tidewater.net>. Your support is immensely appreciated.
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People are talking about "Wayside Cross" ! "I found myself wondering how many people died to make these stories. Survivors (and the dead) tell their tales with devastating aplomb and dangerous self-delusion. Domench's monologues by drunks and suicides, do-gooders and cranks, reckless lovers, and one stalwart child speak for all of us. You won't forget these people or their desperate search for words to justify their lives. There's no turning around from these stories."
Carol Sklenicka author of "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life"
Dan Domench’s WAYSIDE CROSS is a stunning example of what this genre can do: these expertly inter-related dramatic monologues - spoken from this world and the next - create a complex and nuanced universe whose characters’ simple speech is hugely resonant and moving. In the tradition of Steinbeck and Carver, these are the voices of the dispossessed, the disappointed, the half-mad with grief, who speak from the fringes of American society, but struggle with the contradictions and impulses, the fragility of what we are all made of. I will be listening to these stories for years to come. This is the raw, bold, real thing. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s poetry.
Jane Mead, author of "The Usable Field."
People are talking about "Hold Me Fast" ! "Dan's writing is evocative, his production has a wonderful, light touch and the performances in these recordings bring even more life into this cycle of lively monologues. Like us, he is exclusively in audio"
Daren Wang, Editor of Verb AudioQuarterly. The audio literary magazine (www.verb.org)
Review featured on front page of Portland Phoenix
"A thrilling collection of voices."Sam Pfeifle, from his review of "Hold Me Fast" for the Portland Phoenix. Click Here to read the full article.
"Besides the 10 talented voices, subtle background sounds, and somber musical segues, listeners will be drawn to the writing of these performances.... One won't soon find an audiobook that is this dark and sad while also being hopeful and optimistic."
Audiofile Magazine April/May 06
"These powerful and painfully beautiful monologues by Dan Domench are songs of the marginalized American male and female, old and young, with troubles so skillfully and so simply and so eloquently articulated they bring you to your knees. You can't listen to them without being moved, if you have the heart to hear them through to the end."
Dennis Sampson's most recent books are "Needlegrass" published by Carniege Mellon Press and "For My Father Falling Asleep At Saint Mary's Hospital" published by Milkweed Editions Press.
"There is a train in one of these stories that goes roaring past in the middle of the night with a white light flashing and the sound of metal grinding and it is terrible because for the characters at that moment - they are a young couple making love for the first time - it is a metaphor for life, and at the moment the reader believes it too and thinks, like the characters, "Oh no, oh jesus christ no." These stories are talking blues. They are what people tell themselves and each other to keep going. And we hear them as if we were better listeners than we ever really are, and they hold us poised listening at just the point when attention has become so complete it has not yet quite become terror of pity, which is why, I suppose, the stories are also a little funny and oddly beautiful. Dan Domench is an absolutely convincing writer."Robert Hass, Past US Poet Laureate, and author of "Twentieth Century Pleasures" writing about the story "Covered Bridge" included in HOLD ME FAST.
Hear Dan's interview with Maine Public Broadcasting Network radio host Keith Shortall:"Writer Dan Domench of Union has earned critical praise for his ability to bring fictional characters to life--on CD. His new audiobook of ten short stories, titled "Hold Me Fast," is read by actors with roots in Maine, who together help create a familiar small town through spoken word."
Click here to go to the interview
(Windows Medial Player needed for playback)
"Dan Domench's work haunts, sings, slides under skin... something alive there... in the dark...Voices. Streams. Bridges. The body's steam. Somewhere between sex, voices, and silences. Here is a highly resonant, compelling, unforgettable work... from a writer and observer of the world and of the minds in it... here he documents things behind the seeing... a writer who speaks of bodies. Voices. A house by a river. An unlit Church there - in the dark."
Marian Haddad, Poet and essayist, "Saturn Falling Down" and "Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home", Pecan Grove Press.
"Dan Domench writes beautiful and memorable stories told in equally unforgettable - and true - voices. You owe it to yourself to hear Hold Me Fast."
Laurence N. Moffi, "A Citizen's Handbook", poems, Orchises Press, "Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers 1949-1957", University of Nebraska Press, and "The Conscience of the Game", University of Nebraska Press in 2006.
"Dan Domench goes into that lonely place - breaks into that lonely place - and even comes out with the dirty ashtrays. He'll find you in there, too."
Colin Sargent is the author of "Blush" and "Undertow" published by Coyote Love Press, past winner of the Maine Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and
Editor and Publisher of Portland Monthly Magazine"These stories are quite simply the best I’ve encountered in years, and in a form that moves the American short story into a whole new territory. There is a level of maturity, even mastery in these stories, and they fit into a context, come from a lineage, and to my mind Dan Domench is taking his proper place among the finest of our writers."
Alfred DePew, author of "Wild and Woolly: A Journal Keeper's Handbook" and the collection of short stories "The Melancholy of Departure" that won the Flannery O'Connor Award.
"We yearn for truth, all mind and flesh of it. So, too, when pummeled by imperialistic lies, both domestic and foreign, we turn our burning ears toward Domench and his cast — the virtually anonymous, powerful weak, and victimized hero/heroines—who exude probity, loyalty, and affection in mind-bending/body defying acts of compassion, redemption, and je ne sais quoi."
Mark Melnicove, author of "Advanced Memories", poet and artist, and founder of
Tillbury House Press.
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Reporters/Reviewers, contact us for a
free copy of "Hold Me Fast"
May 4, 2009
Feb 1, 2009
I need to take a moment to note the passing of one of America’s greatest writers: John Updike. When I first started to read his novels, I could not understand his concerns. Why was he writing about these well-off middle class people? His characters had affairs and the affairs were known and these known transgressions seemed too light. What was at stake? Would the children go without food? Would the husband lose his job? I was from a different class and a different world. I respected his writing. His style and insight and description were amazing. I knew I was reading the work of a brilliant man. But in the end, so what?
I made a decision to respect this genius writer, but I didn’t like his work. He writes about the east. I am from the west. He writes about the upper middle class. I am from the edge of the middle class: the bottom is right there where I can touch it with my toes.
Then something changed. I was traveling north into Oregon with a family of migrant workers, picking fruit, writing, taking photographs, and living in my 1972 Nova. >>>>Read more…
Aug 11, 2008
The publisher, producer, editor, and executive director Daren Wang has done great things for writers and writing. The link on his name above will provide you with his biography in detail. He started the first audio literary magazine VERB, has produced hundreds of recorded interviews with important authors, most recently as producer of the radio show “Spoken Word”, and he is also the Executive Director of The Decatur Book Festival. (This year’s dates are 8.29.08-08.31.08).
Each quarter a new VERB is released. Volume 2 Issue 2 is presently out and the last three issues are available on the University of Georgia Press site. The issues are also available as a download on audible.com. I know what it takes to produce two audio books containing two CD’s of original writing, performance, and music. Daren Wang is putting out four audio books like this a year and the quality is high. This new issue has a music piece performed by Hem and composed by Dan Meese from the album “Funeral Cloud” that is beautiful and haunting. >>>>Read more…
Jun 11, 2008
I highly recommend the biography of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) by Paul Horgan. “Lamy of Sante Fe” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is one of the great standards of American non-fiction. I was drawn to the book because I came across Paul Horgan’s short stories in a number of fiction anthologies. >>>>Read more…
Dec 3, 2007
A recent survey concluded that Americans read books for a reason, that is, that even readers of romance fiction or mystery fiction report that they read to learn about things like foreign locales, police procedures, etc. Okay, then.
The following paragraph is from the short story “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad. It is in the anthology “Short Story Masterpieces” edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine. It has 36 tremendous stories and cost me a dollar used on amazon.com.
This paragraph comes late in the story. Two white men working for a British corporation at a trading station in Africa find that their assistant Makola has sold their workers and families into slavery in order to obtain the ivory the corporation seeks. The paragraph is describing what happened the day after they confronted Makola, but have done nothing to rescue the newly enslaved workers or to report the kidnappings. The ivory, after all, means that the men have been successful. The two men are named Kayerts and Carlier. Gobila is the leader of the village nearest to the outpost.
“At midday they made a hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola’s name they always added to it an opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobila’s village came near the station that day. No one came the next day, and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila’s people might have been dead and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for those they had lost by the witchcraft of the white men, who had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; >>>>Read more…
Oct 23, 2007
The first day of class Mr. Elkin had walked in limping and sat down behind the front desk. He was uncomfortable in the chair. He introduced himself and then said, “I joined the Army when I was much older than your usual recruit.” He eyeballed the class. I had seen him read his fiction so I knew he was a tremendous performer. I thought, “Uh-oh, a tough guy, we’re gonna get blasted.” Then he said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life.” >>>>Read more…
Aug 7, 2007
Last week we recorded and edited the last short story for the new audio collection “Wayside Cross” – one year after we recorded the first voice for the project. We now have to add the final effects, record the music, and mix. The covers and inserts will be completed and then the master will go to the manufacturing house. If everything goes well with that and their shipping department gets it back to us okay, we will be done. It will be time for the release party and time to forget about how we got it done. Time to welcome the amnesia.
What famous writer said he hated writing, but loved having written? Producing is like that.
There is a line that is repeated in the movie “Shakespeare In Love.” The stage manager/producer is being threatened by his creditors. He assures them he will have the money to pay them when the show goes on stage. But the thugs know that the playwright is missing and the actors have no script. The stage manager says, the show will open as planned. When they ask him, how? He says, I don’t know.
It’s not that producing or directing a performance that involves actors and technicians is especially courageous. >>>>Read more…
Jul 4, 2007
The first Graham Greene novel I read was the suspenseful “The Third Man”. (Greene worked as a spy for his government and drew on this experience for his thrillers.)The second book of his that I read was the comic spy masterpiece “Our Man In Havana”. These books were terrific reads, but there was a depth in the shadows that I wanted more of. I sought out other Greene novels and basically, got knocked flat. The next three novels of his that I read devastated me.
I later learned that Greene wrote novels that he intended to be popular. He called these novels his “entertainments” and he wrote a good number of them. Greene used his facility for description and dialogue and structural plotting to create some of the best novels of this sort ever written. His political sensibility, that is, his concern for the poor and oppressed, can be experienced in these popular novels, but it is tempered by his need to move the plot to a satisfying conclusion.
It was in reading his serious novels “Brighton Rock” (1938), “The Power and The Glory” (1940), “The Heart of The Matter”(1948), and “The End Of The Affair” (1951) that I experienced spiritual, and often physically violent, nighttime descents into city and jungle canyons I wasn’t exactly ready to take. Journeys I could never have prepared for.
(Penguin Classics has reissued “The Power…” and “The Heart…” in trade size paperbacks. I’ve seen them for sale in airport bookstores. God bless Penguin.)
These intense novels are great literature and I will tell you that reading them most certainly has a cost. >>>>Read more…
Jun 27, 2007
I have a friend who is a prep chef in a nice restaurant with a view of the harbor in Camden, Maine. He is a hard working guy who likes to eat and drink. We kept running into each other at live concerts and became friends. One day he asked if I would please lend him a copy of “Hold Me Fast”. I do not carry copies around with me so I didn’t have one to give him. He thought this was a major promotional defect on my part and every time I saw him he would nag me about the CD. I told him that it was available in the library (which we were standing in front of at the time) but that did not satisfy him. So I put the audio book in my car and drove to the restaurant and made it a point to leave the CD for him at the bar.
Jun 10, 2007
A guy is swimming towards me. Gray hair, gray goatee. I am in the shallow end of an indoor pool. My six-year-old son is in my arms. My thirteen-year-old son is standing on the concrete behind me. The man says, “Where did you drive in from?:
Whenever someone is speaking to me in a language that I can determine is some form of English, but I cannot understand what they are saying, I have what my son’s Karate Instructor calls a muscle memory. But instead of recalling something like a perfect spin kick, I recall sliding across asphalt toward a roadside ditch with my boots still tangled in a motorcycle knowing that I have not yet hit the ground, but will soon. Because when I did impact, the concussion made understanding English difficult for more than a few weeks. Fortunately, no one noticed.
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HOLD ME FAST
The debut audiobook in the Speedway Six series. 10 stories. 10 actors. Available for purchase online here!
