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As Kevin Sampsell speaks about the title piece from his new book Beautiful Blemish, he holds his fork a few inches above his plate and reflects on old people having sex.

“Obviously when you’re writing a piece like that, especially when you’re pushing that boundary, you can’t force feed it; you just have to start writing and once you get to a certain part, you know when to push and when to pull back. I don’t know if I had an original idea for that story. I just started writing it and thought ‘I’m going to write a story about these old people having a night at home like anyone has a night home with their girlfriend.’ It’s a pretty common story, the only thing that’s different about that is that it’s with old people. I think old people are great fictional devices.

"Whenever I write about them I don’t want to exploit them, or at least not as much as I would would exploit any other character. Older characters are hidden gold-mines that other authors should explore. They are sort of an enigma. People get to a certain age and they don’t want to think about what grandma or grandpa do all day. But a lot of those people probably have the same wild crazy thoughts that young people do.”

His characters are flawed, and you stumble upon moments of grave significance. As Sampsell says, “I was unsure on how this collection was going to hold together, it was a smattering of different stories of mine. [...] I tried to mix it up with different styles and make a variety.” In “I Heart Frankenstein,” a person that collects cats obtains a horrendously deformed feline that has tried to commit suicide. He nurses the cat back to health, only to watch it jump out of the window of his home. In “Stuck,” we watch a young man working at a convenience store while he talks with his girlfriend who has dropped acid. The title piece shows an older couple engaging in kinky, felt-tip pen fucking with a tenderness just under the surface.

Beautiful Blemish is a collection of short stories, some a few paragraphs long, others several pages. Each one doesn’t hide the gritty detail and doesn’t avoid going to places that may be humbling or visceral. It’s difficult to find a common theme throughout Sampsell’s collection, but each story sheds light on an aspect of human emotion that is uncomfortable to acknowledge.Beautiful Blemish, which has also been nominated for Nerve.com’s Henry Miller Award, reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Each story is a flash of emotion, a singular effect. They frame a moment in time that can’t be avoided. It doesn’t hit you until you read the last word of one of Sampsell’s stories, but each story unlocks some memory that you always thought was your own. You get the sense that Sampsell has snuck into your room, read your journal, and wrote a short story about every person that made you blush, every humbling moment in a public shower, and every sweet tenderness that you can’t articulate. Sampsell doesn’t efface those moments, he captures them like a poem.

“Some of those moments I know are going to be in there. Especially if it is based on something that has happened. The way that I have phrased them are sometimes an accident. There was time when I was conflicted about whether I was going to write stuff that was funny or serious. When I started to write I was trying to write outrageous things, sort of anti-poems. Then I started writing serious stuff. I was getting positive responses from both. Sometimes I am able to write serious stuff with funny elements in it and I can be pretty sentimental. I am aware when there is a sentimental line, I try and put it in a paragraph or scene that is not sentimental.”

Sampsell runs Future Tense books, a small publishing company that published a chapbook from a young author named Zoe Trope. The book, Please Don’t Kill the Freshman was later published by HarperCollins. We share a common love for small presses.
Sampsell has published Beautiful Blemish with Word Riot, another small press. They have their shit together. They are really enthusiastic about the book, as well as putting it together. They are a small press, [...] but I was more than happy to work with them because they are so supportive of their authors. I’ve been doing publishing for a long time, and I think that they do things that I should be doing. I have a lot of fun publishing stuff— I don’t like publishing my stuff anymore, but I love publishing other people’s work.

There have been times when I have seen an author online or in a magazine --like Mike Topp or Charles Ullmann-- and I approach them. Other authors, like Susannah Breslin or Karl Koweski just send me great work out of the blue. You can usually tell when you read a few pieces of someone's work if they are adventurous with their writing or if they have a straight ahead approach. I usually enjoy authors that do things that are strange. Or funny. Or dirty. But I do want it to have literary quality, I like it a little mixed up, a little different."

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