Author: M Téllez


  • Recap on a Mercury Monastery
    Recap on a Mercury Monastery

    By all expressed accounts, the Mercury Intensive, my free, impromptu, experimental June-long writing and storytelling workshop, went well. If you recall, I decided I would run my own workshop after getting yet another rejection from a genre writing workshop I had been hoping to attend. (Admittedly, I don’t apply to a terrible amount of workshops…

  • Monk Reviews Blue-Collar Conservatism by Timothy J. Lombardo
    Monk Reviews Blue-Collar Conservatism by Timothy J. Lombardo

    The postwar United States has experienced many forms of populist politics, none more consequential than that of the blue-collar white ethnics who brought figures like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the rise of this little-understood, easily caricatured variant of populism by presenting a nuanced portrait of the supporters…

  • MERCURY INTENSIVE FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP
    MERCURY INTENSIVE FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP

    Seeking participants for a first-time DIY Philly fiction writers workshop series, intensive for the month of June 2021, facilitated by M. Téllez (aka me, check the About if you need more info). If you are interested in participating, READ THIS PAGE and fill out the interest survey at the bottom. The survey will close on…

  • Service Appreciation
    Service Appreciation

    An old fashioned internet shrine for service expressed through disposable items, mostly bags. @serviceappreciation After tagging a handful of posts with #serviceappreciation on my personal Instagram a couple years ago, I wound up creating a hobby account @serviceappreciation, where every post is a short story or meditation about a different plastic bag. The account has…

  • Bookmarked
    Bookmarked

    “This pandemic blows.” I’ve been saying this as a sign off or greeting in many of my short communications lately. Well—lemme get to the news part of this: All orders of my short story collection Transitional Times Transitional Body will now come with this handsome bookmark, designed for the new year and 4th printing of…

  • Key concepts of message perception & languages of manipulation
    Key concepts of message perception & languages of manipulation

    This content was originally shared as an edition of my DHD newsletter. There, I recommend that you listen to a casual audio overview of the educational pamphlet below, ‘Key Concepts of Message Perception’, complete with the ambient background sounds of summer in Philadelphia 2020. you have to forge yourself into a weapon is something I…

  • Monk Reviews Demystification #2
    Monk Reviews Demystification #2

    A collab between Ambroze Nzams & Paula Martinez. Through the mystery of social networks, I had been mutually following Paula Martinez online for a few years–someone who I never met but seemed cool and was part of a bunch of interesting and fun collab zine projects with friends of theirs. They approached me when volume…

  • Monk Reviews the Amphitheater of the Dead by Guy Hocquenghem
    Monk Reviews the Amphitheater of the Dead by Guy Hocquenghem

    Translated by Max Fox About a year or two ago I cooked up a string of words to function as promotional slogan for my work, particularly for my business card and table signage at zine & book fairs: “sci-fi magic smut survivor memoir.” AMPHITHEATER OF THE DEAD is a scifi survivor memoir. It’s set in…

  • Monk Reviews Portland Diary by Jamie Berrout
    Monk Reviews Portland Diary by Jamie Berrout

    The promotional description of this book is good and apt. Portland Diary is a collection of short stories about women faced with impossible situations. Each of the seven narratives unfolds its heightened, speculative version of the impossible everyday reality we find outselves in as racialized people, queer and colonial and mentally ill subjects, enemies or…

  • Monk Reviews Doc and Fluff by Patrick Califia
    Monk Reviews Doc and Fluff by Patrick Califia

    My copy of this book has a foreword from the author more or less calling critics out over the violence in the book, chiding them to basically get real. I realize many people out there don’t bother to read the forewords or introductions to books, but I’m not one of them and reading that on…