The Millions recently published Patrick’s ode to poets for National Poetry Month.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Poets.

Very honored to have my recent interview with the most famous bugler in America appear in one of my favorite magazines, Oxford American.

For fifteen seconds a year, Steve Buttleman is the most famous man in America. On the first Saturday of every May, sporting his famous red jacket and tiny black hat, he marches from the white pagoda behind the Churchill Downs Winner’s Circle, lifts a polished brass horn to his caramel-colored mustache, and plays “Call to Post.” Buttleman’s rendition—a brief ditty that signals jockeys to lead their horses into the starting gate—grabs the attention of movie stars in Millionaire’s Row, infield drunks, and countless television viewers. It’s also the sign for Kentucky Derby fans to clutch their betting slips and start praying.

Read more here.

Patrick has taken on a twice-monthly gig writing essays for the Weeklings. If you don’t know this site, it’s jam packed with pop/culture essays from very talented writers.

So far, he’s written about rock album “Growers” and the similarities between Smokey and the Bandit II and Jean-Luc Godard.

Big news here at Wentastic Enterprises. For the first time Patrick will be in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Pick up a copy of the April 14 paper and check the Inside the List section.

WHISKEY AND WRY: Writing a best seller can be more like holding a winning lottery ticket than most people imagine — not every payout is worth boasting about. That was the message, anyway, of a recent Salon article with the tell-it-like-it-is headline “My Amazon Best Seller Made Me Nothing.”

Read more here.  

Summing up the whole Jack Daniel’s experience, Patrick wrote an essay for Salon.com about how bestsellers make good money, but not as much as you’d imagine.

In one more week I was going to be a millionaire.

 

At least, that was the rumor circulating around my wife’s family. One more week on Amazon’s best-seller list and I would have seven figures in the bank, easily. Her cousin had looked this fact up on the Internet, so it had to be true.

 

“Please tell them that is nowhere near true,” I said. “But don’t tell them how much money I’m actually going to make.”

• Published by the fine folks at Recorded Books.
• 8 CDs totaling almost 10 hours.
• Read by LJ Ganser, whose radio-sexy voice has done audiobooks for the likes of Jess Walter, James Elroy and baseball dude Alex Rodriguez.

It’s for sale and ready for your next road trip.

The New York Times recently published Patrick’s essay about being a stay-at-home-dad/domestic gigolo. Read it here.

Here’s the beginning:

A romantic Valentine’s is close. Like, broom-closet close. All you need for a sexy good time is a bucket of cleaning supplies and maybe a notary public — depending on how litigious you are. My wife and I are horrible at paperwork, so we struck our deal with a handshake. It was a dubious-sounding pact that went on to revolutionize our marriage: sex for cleaning.

LitReactor had high praise for Broken Piano.

A cultural satire wrapped in a corporate espionage mystery, and by the end a personal reflection on creativity and individuality. A delicate balancing act, and Wensink pulls it off masterfully.

Broken Piano gets four stars from The Sounds. 

The book’s first line kind of says it all:

I’ve never known an American economy that didn’t smell like Red Lobster’s dumpster…

Folks are raving:

“[Wensink] is our Terry Southern and Paul Krassner and possibly one day even our own Jonathan Swift…”

- SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I