Author of Shattered and Tao of Apathy/ poet laureate
My Books
Brutal and frank story of a gifted young man’s spiral into despair. Set in the mid-1990s, standup comic Mikey has it all: an agent who books him the biggest gigs, friends, minor fame, and a family who supports him. All Mikey can focus on when he returns home to Minnesota from a lengthy road trip are the things he’s lost. When he attempts to replace those losses with deranged and damaging behavior, he must face and deal with the cruelest enemy–the past.
The Tao of Apathy is a satirical rump through the modern workplace. The book takes place at a hospital and looks at life from the perspective of multiple employees. There are stupid bosses you’ll love to hate and ridiculous rules created for the shear joy of red tape. The author takes you on a ride, to see what if anything will change for these workers, culminating with some surprising twists. I enjoyed meeting the cast of characters in this book and sharing their experiences. Thomas Cannon did a good job bringing humor to the sometimes frustrating reality of work.
Gathered here are Thomas Cannon’s short stories that have been published over the years. It is an eclectic collection with a few fantasy stories near the end of the book. The title story, Alternate Forms of Life, is a story the author treasures writing. Alexander, the main character, has Aspergers’ and showcases that people on the autism spectrum are complex people with value. That is not to say Alexander is an accurate representation. For conflict and humor reasons, he does have some stereotypical behavior. The intent is that people with autism and those with loved ones on the autism scale will connect to some of the things Alexander says, does, and experience. Some stories came from a single idea. Hammerschlagen combines the ideas of someone throwing her cigarette in the same spot every day and seeing the game Hammerschlagen played in a beer tent. Seven Questions was a response to the writing prompt: “The three witches are blowing this way.” Blue Tarp came from Cannon seeing an online auction for half of a manufactured home.
What would you do if there was nothing wrong with your relationship, but you felt there were going to be problems? In this fractured romance, Sally Story predicts the end of her ten-year marriage and then wedges that prediction between them. Wes is on the verge of becoming a nationally known artist and Sally is an artist in her own craft of hand-crafted furniture. In fact, she supported them for many years and sold his paintings out of her Chicago storefront. Now she is afraid that she won’t be needed anymore and makes him move out. Things get so bad that they each have separate dates on their tenth-year anniversary. Their friends, their art, and their city of Chicago try to bring them together again, but it may be too late.
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