Editor’s Notebook: I'm Speaking with Jim Knipfel Tonight

Hey guys.

I’m not going to be in Springfield tonight. I have an engagement in Brooklyn that I can’t miss: Tonight, I’m doing a live interview with Jim Knipfel at the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. 

Jim is one of America’s greatest writers, with three memoirs, several novels and a collection of fairy tales under his belt. As of earlier this week, copies of his two most recent books, “These Children That Comes at you with Knives” and “The Blow Off,” were available at Springfield’s Barnes and Noble, and I urge interested parties to check them out, as they’re both really great. They're funny, sad, human and true. 

Those two are fiction, but Jim’s probably best known as a non-fiction writer. Since the early ‘90s Jim has written an autobiographical column called “Slackjaw” (also the name of his first book, mostly about his lifelong battle with Retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye condition that has caused him to slowly go blind all of his life), first for the New York Press and now for the website Electron Press.

There’s a good interview with him on a Brooklyn Patch site . This is a cool Youtube trailer for his book “Unplugging Philco.”

Anyway. I know Jim from when I worked at New York Press. He's a great guy and we get along really well. So it should be a good conversation. Check it out if you can. It's free, so how wrong can you go, really?