Tag Archives: fiction

The Subway Test Is Free

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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I mean this in both the “free speech” and “free beer” senses of the term: I use The Subway Test to say what I want, and I have no intention of charging you for my words of wisdom.

I have nothing against the Heather Cox Richardsons and Matt Yglesiases and Paul Krugmans of the Substack world– on the contrary, I love what they are doing, and I’m glad they get financial support for it. And I have a soft spot, or at least an “oh, buddy, bless your heart” compassion, for the thousands of people on Substack with a tiny following who are trying to tease those singles or tens of readers into some stream of income for themselves.

But I have a decent job that I like doing, at least most days, and I get paid enough teaching first year composition at a community college to keep body and soul together. I write slowly, and I know that a paid readership wouldn’t improve me on that score. If I had, say, 14 paid subscribers to please with a regular feuilleton of my own wit and incisive commentary, the pressure to please them would not improve my writing, increase my happiness, or add anything of value to your lives.

But for all that, if you read something here that makes you think, “I like that Pitkin–that slowpoke speaks my mind,” there are other ways you can support me.

A like on one of my posts is nice. A comment is even better.

And if you really want to give me some money, feel free to buy my novel Stranger Bird. It’s a charming YA fantasy written during the height of the Harry Potter Industrial Complex–in reaction to those heady times, I looked back to the older style of YA fantasy that Ursula Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, and Richard Adams were practicing back in the 1960s and 70s. The result is literally magical.

Or, if you’re not so sure about YA fantasy, you could spring for Exit Black, my 2024 meditation on space tourism which is really a meditation on violence, techbros, and American predators and prey. There’s also a great audiobook version of this one, read by the incomparable Catalina Hoyos.

Or, if you really want to support me, start an independent publishing house of impeccable good taste and artistic daring, and pick up Pacifica to be published in your catalog. That’s my top support tier: if you spend thousands of dollars on me, you’ll have a publishing house with at least one title. That one is a reach goal.

Where Is the Noir?

04 Monday Aug 2025

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories, Utopia and Dystopia

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I’ve been gathering ideas for a fourth novel, and almost the only thing I know about it is that I want to write a noir detective story. Everything else is sketched out in the faintest outlines: I know the protagonist will be a woman because I try to switch between male and female protagonists with each new novel. Also, the woman’s adult son will figure prominently in the plot. So will a guitar.

Beyond that, I don’t know a lot. I don’t think the protagonist will be a professional detective–in this, the story will be more like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana or Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios than like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Oh, and the story will be set in Portland.

Portland’s White Stag sign in September 2016. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Why Portland? Well, besides the fact that I’ve lived here for 25 years and know the city pretty well, I’m struck by many of Portland’s noir qualities. The city grew fast over the last 30 years. There’s a lot of money here. One doesn’t need to look very far to find public corruption. Add to that the city’s darkness and drizzle and fog for six months of the year (or seven or nine months), and the atmospherics are great for noir.

But my decision to set the book in Portland got me thinking: what are the great noir cities? Los Angeles is the type specimen because of Raymond Chandler and his spiritual progeny, from Chinatown and LA Confidential to The Big Lebowski. Apparently, then, one doesn’t need a foggy, rainy city as a noir setting (though I was surprised at how often chandler has it raining in The Big Sleep–I’ve never seen so many rainy days in the real LA). Los Angeles in Chandler’s 1930s was still a boomtown: my paternal grandfather’s family had migrated to LA sometime around 1920, I think, on a strength of an advertisement for the city that claimed that in California “the only man who isn’t thriving is the undertaker.” A lot of people from all over the country came in those years, and the mixing of a native Latine population with Blacks of the Great Migration and White Okies and immigrants from all over Asia made for a welter of changing social mores, violence, and resentment. Add to that a land rush of mostly White speculators and the artistic gold rush of Hollywood, and all the ingredients for noir were there: cynicism, corruption, a sense that with enough money all outrages and abominations were permissible.

But many of these boomtown dynamics seem to have smoothed out in LA somewhat over the last 100 years. I don’t think of LA so much as a noir city now–by the time you get to The Big Lebowski, set in the early 1990s, the vibe is more farce than noir.

I don’t know–maybe I haven’t spent enough time in Southern California lately. I’d be happy to hear from Angelinos about the noir qualities of contemporary LA. But what does make a city ripe for the noir? As I think of cities that I have some familiarity with, it’s not hard to put them in noir and not-noir buckets: Seattle and San Francisco, definitely noir. Salt Lake City and Phoenix, not noir. Las Vegas, not noir (at least not today, I feel–1950s Las Vegas is a different thing). Reno, by contrast, strikes me as totally noir. Mexico City is very noir (Grim Fandango, anyone?) while London is not. Budapest, noir. Vienna, not noir–at least not since the days of The Third Man.

What do you think? Where are the under-appreciated noir cities today? How big does a noir city have to be? It’s hard for me to imagine a noir set in the country–that’s the realm of the gothic–but can you have suburban noir? College town noir? I feel great about setting this new novel in Portland, since it’s the first and maybe only time in my life I’ll be doing that. But I’m curious what great noir cities I’m leaving out.

“In and Out of Rain,” photo credit Tony Moore.

We’re #8! We’re #8!

13 Monday Jan 2025

Posted by in Advertising, Book reviews, Exit Black, Lit News, My Fiction, Science Fiction

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That was my publisher’s note to me when we learned that Exit Black cracked the top ten best sci fi audiobooks in 2024 at Discover Sci-Fi. I’m super stoked: while I would have loved for Exit Black to take the #1 spot, of course, there’s no shame losing out to the likes of Adrian Tchaikovsky narrating his own book and Jeff VanderMeer having his work read by Bronson Pinchot. Carolina Hoyos is a hell of a reader, and I was very lucky to have gotten to work with her.

I loved every step of this project with Blackstone Publishing, and to make my Captain Obvious Statement of the Day: Blackstone knows audiobooks. Thanks so much to all of you who voted and all of you who listened. And, if you haven’t listened yet, if you ever feel a hankering for a tale about a bunch of techbros getting their comeuppance, Exit Black couldn’t be more timely.

Freaking Out in Powell’s City of Books

30 Monday Dec 2024

Posted by in Exit Black, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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As a Portlander, I have to contend with the reality of Powell’s City of Books. It’s the largest independent bookstore in the world, and as you might imagine it has a mighty footprint on the Portland literary scene. A friend who worked there told me about 20 years ago that 40% of Amazon’s book orders actually go through Powell’s. I doubt that that is still the case today, but it gives you some idea of the size of the place, as well as the indirect role Powell’s played in the rise of Amazon. One of Portland’s most popular tourist destinations, Powell’s City of Books is its own Portlandia sketch.

For many years, basically from the time I started writing fiction in my thirties, I had a lot of trouble going into Powell’s. Part of the dread I felt was simple cognitive overload. But I was also contending with two related kinds of self-loathing in the City of Books, one as a reader and one as a writer.

As a reader, I would feel depressed in City of Books to come into contact with all the great books that I hadn’t read and would likely never read. As a writer, I would despair that of the tens of thousands of titles that were on the shelves on any given day, nothing I had written had ever shown up there. In my foolishness, the place had become a visual metaphor for two ways I felt I had come up short as a human being.

Eventually the feeling passed, probably just because I got older. It doesn’t upset me so much anymore that I don’t have that many more books to read in my future. Even if I live a fantastically long life, it seems unlikely that I have more than 2000 books left to read, and the number could be far, far lower than that. The key, as my friend and bandmate John Governale has shown me, is not to try to read all the good books out there, but rather just to remember that there is always a great book out there for me–I don’t need to spend any time reading a bad one.

As for the fact that my stuff had never shown up on the shelves of Powell’s City of Books, I eventually got over myself there, too. I think that as I got better as a writer, I started to find more joy in just writing well (as distinct from winning awards or getting prestigious publications or big book contracts). I still love to get published, but even more than that I love the feeling of putting together a story that really works.

As I tell my students and my kids, there are lots of situations where you start getting good at something right around the time that you don’t have to do that thing anymore. And there was a similar feeling of irony for me when I went into Powell’s City of Books last week and found that my latest novel, Exit Black, is indeed on the shelves there. I still prefer the smaller independent bookstores in my life–Broadway Books, White Oak Books, Annie Bloom’s–but it is a nice feeling to know that a tourist in Portland who wanted to find my work for some reason could find Exit Black right in the Gold Room of Powell’s City of Books, section 722.

Towards 1000 Readers

28 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by in Book reviews, Exit Black, Lit News, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction

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Not long after I published my first novel, Stranger Bird, I mused on this blog about how many people might one day read my book. I realized quickly that it would always be tough for me to know, since the number of people who have Stranger Bird on their shelves will always be higher than the number who actually read it. Exhibit A for this argument is my own TBR pile, which has 34 books in it, most of them better than Stranger Bird, and many of which I will probably never get to, TBR piles being what they are in my life.

Here is the dream I had for Stranger Bird back then: I hoped that the book would one day have 100 readers. That excellent book has something like 16 reviews on Amazon right now, so my guess is that 100 readers is a decent ball park estimate for how many people have read, or will read, Stranger Bird.

Why am I bringing this up now, six years later? Because my new novel Exit Black, is traditionally published, with an actual marketing and promotion team working on it, with actual advanced reader copies and early reviews. I want to hope that a lot more people will read this new book. But what is a realistic hope? 10,000 readers? 100,000?

That seems like a lot of readers for an obscure science fiction writer who mostly works as a community college English instructor. For now, let me amplify my dreams by a single, ambitious order of magnitude: I hope that 1000 people will read, and love, Exit Black. I’ll never know how many will actually read it, but if Blackstone sells that many copies, or somewhat more than that, I will nurse the belief that a thousand people will read Exit Black.

I’d love for my number of readers to increase by an order of magnitude with each new book: 10,000 readers for Pacifica when it comes out, 100,000 for unnamed novel #4. At that rate, the entire population of Earth will be reading my ninth novel when I publish it, and then I can die knowing that I was the Colleen Hoover of my generation.

(I suppose that Colleen Hoover herself is the Colleen Hoover of my generation, but whatever).

Anyway, I’m sure that the Earth’s ecosystems have some carrying capacity for readers of Joe Pitkin books and that the population will level out at some limit long before I reach ten billion readers. I don’t have to worry about that right now. Right now, I’m hustling to get a thousand.

Hello, Knowledge Seekers

21 Thursday Dec 2023

Posted by in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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I once had dreams of writing witty, engaging content for this blog once per week. I guess I still nurse that fond hope. But obviously something about my strategy hasn’t been working so far: I believe this is only my fourteenth post this year.

The main reason for the slowdown is what it’s always been: my job. Teaching has been in many ways a wonderful career; in other ways, it has seemed like a wish I made on the monkey’s paw: I loved reading and writing, and so I thought that becoming an English major was a natural fit. And what better job for an English major than teaching community college English?

Little did I know when I was a 23 year-old teaching assistant that there would be weeks upon weeks of my job, year after year, where I would do nothing but read or write–and that none of that reading and writing would be for pleasure. I’ve probably read 20,000 student essays by this point in my career: many were thoughtfully written, and most were at least earnestly written, but not one of them was something I would have picked off of a newsstand shelf for fun. (Nor, to be fair, would my students have written any of them for fun). And every one of those essays, even the most slapped-together, carelessly constructed rush jobs, demanded that I write something real in response. By the time I get home most days, I barely have the mental energy to read the directions on a microwave burrito, much less read a novel, much less write one.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to quit teaching. I love community college students: I love their grit, their humor, their intellect, their disarming mix of cluelessness and commitment. I love seeing students ten or fifteen years later and hearing their excitement when they tell me that they still remember how to use commas around an appositive or that they never again started a conclusion with the words “in conclusion.” Often they remember things that I barely remember saying or things that aren’t really that important in the full analysis of what makes good writing. But some of what they remember is a kind of totem to them, and years later, they are better writers.

There are several weeks every term that I feel the fatal stroke or heart attack is just around the corner for me, that I’m just a day or two away from collapsing at the front of a classroom or dying with a stack of half-graded essays in my inbox. And then, every term (usually around finals week), the mental fog lifts again. I feel like I can go on for one more term, or maybe even for a whole year. I’m always reminded in those moments of the lines from the wonderful Jane Kenyon poem “Back,” which I believe she wrote about the lifting of a depression, but which I feel could apply to any teacher at the end of an academic term:

. . . I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas . . .

Every day, I walk into class with the greeting “Hello, classmates!” or “Hello, knowledge seekers!” I try to present myself as though I were a wise, relentlessly optimistic trail guide leading them on their mystical journey through that ancient land of rhetoric. Some students surely must know that even thirty years into my career, I’m still faking it. But often enough, students take me up on what I’m offering: they follow along whether they realize or not what a sham all my optimism and confidence are. And some of them–many of them, most of them–finish up in a different place than where they started.

Portrait of the teacher by a beloved ENGL101 student in fall 2023.

New Fiction on the Tubes

15 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Science Fiction, Stories

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Image courtesy of http://www.centerfieldofgravity.com

I’m pleased to announce that my story “Before Concord” has been chosen as a finalist for the 2022 Gravity Award by the fine folks at Center Field of Gravity. As they say on the Oscars, it’s an honor just to be nominated.

“Before Concord” is a favorite of mine: it’s my first satisfactory attempt at a hard-boiled detective story (though, because I’m me, it’s set on the University Republic of Mars at the end of the 22nd century). With all the novel work I have been doing lately, I’m very happy to see one of my shorter pieces get picked up.

The winner will be announced this Tuesday the 17th of May, and you can read the story in all its nominated glory here.