Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
I’ve recently paid attention to the sonnet form of poetry, and even wrote a modest entry of my own. Now I’ve been studying the villanelle. Like a sonnet, a villanelle follows a defined structural form, and therein lies my interest, which is why I’ve been drawn to Pecha Kucha. As a novelist, I have a lot of creative license with form: you can do anything you want, as long as you keep the reader...
Wondering what to give to that smart and curious person on your holiday gift list? Try one of these gripping novels: IN FLIGHT A business executive and family man survives a plane crash but suffers a rare dissociative fugue, disappearing for several days until he is found and must put his life back together. Reviewers wrote: “Simply put, this book is excellent. In Flight is a thought...
Do you hold grudges? Crows do. They have a keen intelligence on the level of chimpanzees and can identify and remember faces—and remember wrongs. I recently read a feature about crows and the people tormented by them (New York Times). The American Crow One of the victims was Gene Carter, from Seattle, who once waved a rake in his backyard at crows encroaching on a robin’s nest. Since then, crows...
Although my lifelong writing love is the novel, I’m exploring other forms in my dotage. Like my love for Pecha Kucha, where you write and recite a story that takes exactly 6:40 seconds to tell, using 20 slides that each stay on the screen for 20 seconds. Three times I’ve performed that dog and pony show in front of live audiences, and had fun every time. I’ve also dabbled in shorter fiction, just...
I had two encounters yesterday—random occurrences but related thematically. In the morning, I pulled into the parking lot at the auto parts store where I’d gone to get a new battery installed in my vehicle. As I approached the entrance, a man came out of the store and approached me. He apologized for bothering me and said he hated to ask, but he was short three dollars for a part he needed and...
Paul, Jimmy, and I formed a three-person film club to support our recently re-opened local independent movie theater, The Spectrum. We committed to attending a film together every month. Last night was our first go, and we brought along my niece, Ani, who was visiting. It was Paul’s idea for the club, so he got to choose the first movie: Anora, a genre mashup I’ll call a romdramedy—romance...
To fill in the time I no longer spend reading disturbing news I’m reading more fiction, which can also be disturbing but at least is made up. I finished Peter Heller’s “Burn” in just a few days. Heller writes literary adventure novels. His first novel, “The Dog Stars,” is about a pilot navigating life in a dystopian America where most people have died in a plague. I thought it was excellent. But...
I’ve had a few days to collect my thoughts—and they aren’t good. At first, I stumbled about in disbelief, finding it hard to believe that snake got elected again. I hadn’t realized how sure I was that Harris would win. I never stated this, even to myself, but my shock and grief at the outcome proved I hadn’t been remotely prepared for what happened. I accept what happened now, and am figuring out...
Have you not known the crushing burden and weightlessness of intense desire for someone or something. The wanting, the longing, the waiting, the hoping, the whirlpooling and churning inside you, the straining of your composure when you can’t affect the outcome, when no voodoo or charms or superstitions or prayers will help. You can only wait for fortuity to turn you way. You have no control. You...
Yesterday, Harriet and I participated in an organized trip to Scranton, PA to canvass registered Democrats and encourage them to vote in this swing state. I couldn’t have been more out of my comfort zone: knocking on strangers’ doors and engaging in political conversation. I might be more comfortable on the front lines in a war zone. But with a fervent desire to see Trump defeated and relegated...
I’m sub teaching in a tenth-grade English class today. The students have been reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” and are down to the last few chapters. This seminal novel in American literature is often required reading for ninth or tenth-graders, and most of the students in the class have at least some level of appreciation for the book. I’ve read it. You’ve read it. Most of us have seen the movie...
Fifteen feet up in a tree stand, sitting on a narrow perch and tucked among fragrant hemlock branches, I witness nighttime become morning. I’m too deep in the canopy to see the sun lift above the horizon, but as the sky lightens, shapes appear around me: the sandy, rutted path that descends from the hill to my right and crosses a gully where a stream trickles along; the meadow to my left and the...
I’ll admit what few American male writers of my generation would or could: I’ve never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or its follow-up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No excuses, it just didn’t happen. Those novels were never assigned in English. Maybe as a young teen I picked them up on my own and something about the style or voice didn’t grab me. That’s my best guess...
I don’t post much about politics because it leads to divisiveness and arguments, and I can easily be out-debated, but we’re less than three weeks until election day and anxiety is slithering through me like a dark snake. I’m having trouble sleeping, the news is like a drug I crave but fear, and the polls are spiking my blood pressure. I agree with this guy. I’ve engaged in several discussions in...
So much on the homestead list during this seasonal change and only a few hours allotted today, putting away the patio furniture and raking and getting the storm windows washed and up, and damn if one of the sills isn’t chipped and needs to be painted and on another window the exterior casing is coming off and must be tightened up, these extra tasks biting into my time, I’m not going to get done...
I had the honor and pleasure last night of being one of eight presenters at Pecha Kucha night hosted by the Opalka Gallery at Sage College. Pecha Kucha is a unique and fascinating presentation format. Every presenter works within the same structure. You get 20 slides, each slide stays on screen for 20 seconds and then automatically advances to the next. You get exactly 6:40 to present (20 slides...
Another innovative writer has died. Beginning in the late 1960s, Robert Coover emerged as a star of metafiction—fiction rejects narrative conventions and realism. It uses language, style, and structure to point out the artificiality of itself. Last week, I wrote about “To Whom It May Concern:” by another metafiction god, Raymond Federman. This week, Robert Coover, who just passed away at age 92...
I earned my MA at the University of Buffalo in the writing program chaired by Raymond Federman—a name you’ve likely never heard. Federman was born in 1928 in France and at age fourteen his parents hid him in a closet while the German Gestapo rounded up the Jews in Paris and sent them to perish in the Nazi death camps. Federman survived. His parents and siblings did not. Federman went on to become...
He has one job. It’s not even a job—it’s a privilege and an honor: making love to his beautiful wife. On an August Saturday morning at first light, end of summer, a day off for both of them, the window raised and a quiet breeze from the lake fluttering the curtains. This is the day Frank looks forward to every week after long hours of work, after the neck pain and back knots from standing for...
At the opposite end of the spectrum from those 100,000-word novels I tend to write are six-word stories I also enjoy. One of the most famous six-word stories ever written, and perhaps the most devastating, is by Ernest Hemingway. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I’ve written six-word memoirs and six-word Covid stories. Now here are twenty new ones. You should try it. Six...
