shit. i just can’t seem to say enough good about Jackie Corley. she’s just such a phenomenal writer. listen:

you know something’s special real quickly. it doesn’t take much exposure. not much at all, when it’s something really done with love and soul and heart. with Jackie’s writing, you know it even sooner than that. like the first sentence. i swear when i read the words “You cry for Foster” for the first time, and for each time thereafter, i knew i was in for something i hadn’t bargained for. and the more i read, the deeper it got.

there are times when you just want to drop everythng and scream. for the love, the passion of it all. also the sickness, the blinding disgust you feel when you realise that nobody else is ever going to have the exact same experiences as you. ever, period. Foster O’Reilly, the story, and the character, made me want to drop everything and just scream.

that’s not to say it’s maddening. i mean, it is, but for all the right reasons. but there’s a joy underneath it, like crumbs under the kitchen tablecloth. there’s a real (and i mean REAL, god damn it) joie de vivre and an urgency toward the sacred preciousness of The Moment, a celebration of those things we can never have back again. it’s like hearing a silly kid’s nursery-rhyme song at a funeral: there’s a purity there that you just don’t usually get from ordinary day-to-day life (even though it’s really there, it’s all over the place; just hidden from view).

but the point i wanted to make is that this kid really has it. (i’m sorry, Jackie, for using the ‘k’ word and all, but the maturity in your writing is way beyond what most people are capable of at 39 years of age, let alone 19, fer chrissakes!) she’s really got her own voice, and that’s a big damn deal in an unoriginal and mediocre era. a fresh voice at that, and full of substance – real substance. i don’t know where she gets it from, but i love it. if she isn’t published-so-much-she’s-jaded by this time two years from now, then this world is vastly more fucked up than i thought it was. the world owes itself this one favor: to drink her writing in like the sweet nectar that it is, to celebrate it in excess. Jackie Corley is the Walt Whitman, the Ernest Hemingway, the J.D. Salinger and the Jack Kerouac of the twenty-first century. period.