The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the hot, urgent Santa Ana foehn winds fueled devastating fires in the Los Angeles area. But this most recent episode might be the most horrific of all, arriving on the tail of an extremely dry season and following the hottest year ever on record. This isn’t a forest fire burning acres of trees in a remote area; this one is burning houses...
I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form of book censorship. But that’s just my...
We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more mindful and grateful, helping others, spending more time with family, etc. A few of us wanted...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Four years ago I stopped mowing a section of lawn behind my house. It was a couple of hundred square feet we no longer needed for soccer, baseball, and football from when the kids were young. I no longer built backyard ice rinks. What was the point of having all that lawn? I allowed the patch to return to nature’s whim. During the first summer the grass grew uniformly tall and a breeze...
