We recently connected with Danny Shot and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Danny, thanks for joining us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

Being a writer/poet is a weird calling. The vast majority of us feel underappreciated no matter how much or little recognition we receive. There’s also something that my friend Jennifer Blowdryer refers to as The Bitters. I’ve been doing this a long time, but fighting the bitters is a battle I wage with relish. I live in New Jersey, right across the river from Manhattan, but New York poets consider me a “Jersey Poet.” I write poetry and prose, so a common critique is that my poetry is simply prose with line breaks, and conversely, that my stories are very “poetic” which is not always meant as a compliment. Also, in a couple of reviews of my new book of stories, NIGHT BIRD Flying, the reviewers questioned whether my work falls into the fiction or nonfiction category. Doesn’t matter to me, I prefer to think of my writing as genre fluid. What I’ve learned is to keep an open mind, read plenty of different types and styles of writing, and to make sure to have experiences outside the literary world.

Danny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Here’s short bio: Danny Shot’s WORKS was published in 2018 and his new collection of poetry The Jersey Slide will make its debut in the fall of 2025 also from CavanKerry Press. His prose, collected in Night Bird Flying will be published in February 2025 by Roadside Press. Danny is the Poet in Residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. He was longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. Danny is a proud New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (2024 – Lifetime). Check out his website: dannyshot.com.

But there’s much more than that. The way I got into writing is interesting. I took a course during my sophomore year of college titled “The Beat Tradition in American Literature,” which I loved. That and the fact that I failed chemistry (twice), made me re-think my pre-medicine route. I also met famed poet Allen Ginsberg at that time. I boldly handed him a poem I had just written titled “America ’76” which was a take off on his well known poem “America.” Let me just say that my poem was God awful. I filled the poem with faux street wisdom, political proclamations, plagiarized KISS lyrics, you get the picture. Simply a terrible poem, written by a 19-year-old poseur. A week later I received a postcard from Ginsberg telling me what I could do to make my writing better. This is part of what he wrote: “Another thing you gotta remember is that each line should have some haiku or double-joke or image or mind-sound or Poetry in it, not be just flat prose—even if the original doesn’t do this. you can, & try to do better than the original, why not—remember it’s the mutual playfulness, innate intelligence called forth, not just resentment complaint—but the happy mind wildly funny—Good luck & keep sharp and honest.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Eliot Katz and I started Long Shot magazine in New Brunswick, NJ in 1982. I can’t speak of Eliot’s motivations, but I was motivated in part by spite. I had just gotten a nasty rejection letter for my poems from Beatitude magazine in San Francisco. I just thought, fuck it – I can do this better, more humanely (for writers), and include a more diverse range of voices than most arts and literary magazines of the time. Eliot and I got our start up money from a poetry reading Allen Ginsberg did with us. He simply split the door with us getting half the proceeds. Back then, Eliot printed it at the print shop he worked at and we were off and running. We sold enough copies to have enough money to print up a Volume 2. Then we sold enough to print Volume 3 and so forth. This was the business model – sell enough copies to do one more issue – that lasted for 20 plus years. Of course with time our product got more sophisticated, we printed more copies, and we had better distribution, but the basic model worked. We received no grants, government or private, and the vitality of our magazine reflected that.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being a writer is being able to communicate with other people. Of course, like pretty much every artist, I wish I could communicate with more people, but I’m happy that I sometimes make an impact on people’s ways of seeing and understanding the world. I get the most joy when I get a compliment from an old high school pal. I grew up in a working class Irish and Italian town in New Jersey, and these friends are the audience I had in mind when I first began writing. I also feel good when I can help a younger or less experienced writer achieve success in one way or another.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dannyshot.com/
• Instagram: dannyshot57
• Facebook: Danny Shot
• Twitter: @dannyshot.bsky.social

Image Credits

Caroline Schott, Vera Sirota, Deborah Troeller, CavanKerry Press, Roadside Press