Jason Makansi | Author

Here you’ll find elements of my professional career and my avocations and passions. Hopefully, it reflects what engages me AND what could engage you. This isn’t an on-line diary or a corner confessional. It is a place for meaningful communication and mind-share. Someone said you spend the first half of your life absorbing and “taking” and the second part of your life “giving back.” I am well into my second half, barring miracle medical technology, and therefore in arrears on this score. And of course we are always learning. So, leave something that makes this place richer. Take something that enriches you. Be funny. Be serious. Be yourself.

My passion for communicating officially began with a family newspaper I “published” when I was 12. It had a run of three issues. My personal “fourth estate” couldn’t dent the first estate, the iron fist of paternal discipline. In some ways, this site is a more comprehensive publication, a personal newspaper seeking to enlarge a tiny part of the overall conversation.

When I turned 40, I attempted a novel. It was a colossal failure but the premise was good. The title was “The Halfway House,” a mythical place where confused middle aged people could be immersed in all the arts and sciences, all political and cultural aspects of life, a place for intelligent discourse, discovery, and drying out (mentally – hence the title). Mythical, the antithesis of a museum, dramatic production, visual arts, or publishing house. All “gatekeepers,” and interpolators of the communication are removed. Art, insight, and a more balanced sense of life bubbled up from the maelstrom, the chaos of social interaction. In a less ambitious way, this is what I hope to achieve here, in an asymptotic sort of way.

Signal Point, published in “Rainbow Curve.”

Little Egypt, published in
“Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley,” Southeast Missouri State University.

American Muezzin, published in “Mizna: Arts, etc”

Hallucination in D Minor, published in “Marginalia,” Western State College of Colorado

Moon Dust, published in “Arabesques.”

There is no real money in literary fiction. The “business” is rigged for academic “publish or perish” requirements. Non-academics are dependent on each other to push stuff out to readers. For this reason, I’ve included links here to authors that I think deserve your time and attention.

Nancy Baumann
David Dickson
Matt Getty
Jim Huggins
Allen Kopp
Pete Sipchen
Jamey Stegmaier
Regina Till
Emily Wood
Fred Venturini