Woeful Spotlight: Nicholas Frazier

Nick's story in All Woe Great and Small tells us of all the other things that bears do in the woods. 

Your story is about an unfortunate altercation with a bear. Tell us about another altercation you had with an animal. 

In my junior year of college, it was finals week. This one day I had studied for what seemed like 24 hours straight. It was about 6pm and my roommate and I finally just threw our hands in the air in frustration and decided to be done with studying. With all this mental frustration of studying we thought,  "how can we take a serious break to calm down?" We started drinking. 

Quite a few later we were pretty buzzed and decided to go for a walk. We decided to grab some road beers and head to this field behind our apartment building. We stood there for about two minutes when a cop car drove up to the edge of the field. The fact that we had beers in public would have gotten us a ticket. Right before the end of the school year that would not have gone over well. So being buzzed and in violation of a campus rule, we ducked on the ground and waited for them to drive along. 

Finally they drove away and when we stood up, we heard a twitch. We spun around ,and in the darkness of the field; we could hear an animal moving around. Being not in our right minds, we were very nervous. Not only were cops around, but now some animal we couldn’t see was approaching. What could it be? In a drunken stupor we scrambled to get our phones out to light the area up a little bit. When we finally got them out we turned them on the brightest mode and shined them into the field where we saw not one...not two...but AT LEAST 20 wild bunny rabbits staring at us. We got very nervous that we were about to be overrun by small bunnies. I gestured to my roommate to not move. He took it as "let's run ahead full charge," which he did. As he bolted forward, the bunnies scampered all over and I made the decision to just go with it, and we ran until we got to our apartment. Attacked by bunnies and bears, oh my.

In the story, you compare your dad's snoring to a grizzly bear. Are there any other woodland creatures he resembles?

I’d take away the grizzly part and just relate him to a teddy bear. Frazier men very often are believed to be scary and intimidating at first, but we are just cuddly, harmless creatures. This doesn’t mean we don’t have our grizzly side, but we’re typically very loving beings.

If an extra-terrestrial landed on your porch, what are the first three questions you would ask it?

Could I go with them?

How often do they laugh at earth and all of its silly and petty arguments?

What kind of food do they eat?

And many, many more.

Promote yourself. What other writing projects are you working on? 

I am always writing and updating my blog. www.nicholasjfrazier.wordpress.com. As a young writer, I am always developing and maturing my writing style. I use my blog as a place to learn and grow. I had been writing a book during college until my hard drive crashed and I lost the whole thing. But I develop a million novel ideas in my head a day and have been working to put a few of them on paper since then. Of course since then I back them up a lot. On top of writing, I have a degree in visual arts, and I’ve been photographing and developing graphic design concepts since I graduated. Currently I am Case Managing for Father Bill’s & Mainspring, a non-profit working to end homelessness in the South Shore of Massachusetts. My goal and dream is to be a photojournalist reporting on underexposed areas suffering from injustice around the world.

Woeful Spotlight: Kristen Caisse

Kristen's story in All Woe Great and Small stresses the importance of fire safety...namely, having a fireman in the family who will give you CPR when your dog destroys your house. 

Your puppy Miller destroyed your house on Christmas Eve. Tell us another memorable Miller story.

One day we left Miller home alone out on our sun porch, it was only for an hour or so but when we got home Miller had eaten through the wall. Literally through the wall - as in you could almost get outside from the hole. We are guessing he just want to go outside and play, or saw a squirrel.

On that fateful Christmas Eve, your husband (a firefighter) came to your rescue in his emergency vehicle. Were there any other times his rescue training came in handy in your house?

 
My husband is very handy in general so that has definitely helped in repairing all of Miller's destruction. His rescue training has come in handy by being able to calm me down whenever I wanted to kill Miller.

If an extra-terrestrial crash landed his spaceship on your porch, what would Miller's reaction be to it?

He would probably run over, sniff it...lick it, then sit on its lap.

If you were to write Miller's autobiography, what would it be titled?

It Was Like That When I Got Here

Thanks to Buffalo Small Press, and a promise (threat?) of a return...

Special thanks to the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair for having "Mug of Woe" this weekend!  We had a great time, met some talented artists and writers, and met many new fans of Woe!

Woe editors Kyle and Jenn will be back in the Niagara region in June for the Niagara Literary Arts Festival!  They'll be teaching two classes on Saturday, June 29th -- a two-hour writing workshop Writing Humor Essays, and a four-hour writing/marketing seminar, Getting Paid to Make Editors Laugh.