Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
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...
Midlife crisis novels are nothing new, but Miranda July’s “All Fours” is. Typically when you think of a midlife crisis, what comes to mind might be the frustrated husband who buys his sports car and has an affair, or the neglected wife who searches for meaning after her children are grown or visits the plastic surgeon. “All Fours” blows those tropes to smithereens in a bold and erotic tale about...
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...
On a secluded mountain lake, a silent, cool morning, I am compelled by reality’s transient and illusory nature. The simultaneous coexistence of two states: the object and its mirrored image. The reflection is and is not reality. Both conditions feel true. Like our own reflections in the mirror: it’s us but not us. The two worlds feel equally real, equally important. And so I pay close...
I’m putting on my suit for my nephew’s wedding. Jack and Kristin are getting married today on a perfect September day in Portland, Maine. It’s true: I own only one viable suit, and I haven’t worn it since . . . there’s something in the jacket pocket, and I pull it out—a memorial card for Thomas Grande, Jack’s uncle who passed away last year. This is my wedding and funeral suit. I last wore it at...
“Learn a New Skill.” This item has been on my To-Do list since I started making such a list a couple of months ago. I turned to list-making because I didn’t always remember what I wanted or needed to do, and a few tasks were slipping through the cracks. I haven’t yet crossed “Learn a New Skill” off the list. It makes an encore appearance every few days when I update my list. I’ve dabbled in...
Robert pressed the accelerator and merged onto the travel lane. The service area with illuminated signs and parking lot lights receded in his rearview mirror. He faced the black night. Barely visible in the distance ahead along the straight dark highway a single red taillight glowed. Behind him no headlights were visible. It was a lonely stretch of road in the middle of the night in the middle of...
We’re in Snyder’s Shoes in Manistee along the shore of Lake Michigan, where we vacationed with the family for many years when the kids were young and spent a week with Harriet’s sister. The two photos (taken 15 years apart) were an annual tradition. We posed with a statue of the tallest man who ever lived. Robert Wadlow stood 8 ft. 11 inches and survived until only age 22, dying in 1940. He...
The love triangle is a classic narrative device in literature and film. It has been used throughout storytelling history, serving as the structural foundation for prize-winning literature, genre novels, classic films, and B-movies. The love triangle comes pre-baked with powerful story elements such as complex human emotions, moral dilemmas, and social dynamics. Inevitably, there’s one character...
Twenty-five years ago, when Nikki first became my barber, my hair was thick and dark brown throughout. Now it’s thick and dark gray. Together we watched over the years as the hair clippings fell onto the floor around her barber chair. I started by saying, “Oh, there’s some gray in there,” and then haircut by haircut, year by year, some became a lot, and I eventually said, “Oh, there’s still a...
In Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” there’s a brief exchange of dialog between two minor characters when one asks the other how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” That quote resonated with me because it’s the way I stopped writing: gradually and then suddenly. I haven’t written a blog post in over a month. I used to write ten or...
My head is in the clouds and I’m in daydreaming mode, for how long I cannot tell, but worry not, I’m not delusional or illogical or unaware of what’s going on. In fact I’m all too aware, and my head in the clouds at least means I’m looking up, so there’s that. Give me the towering gray nimbus or the distant hazy puffs or the cirrus whisps. I’m not an uninterrupted blue sky kind of guy. I...
Even the blank page gets in on the fun. Write here, one says. No, start on me, entices another. Fickle pages, how they flirt, each desiring to be the chosen one, to have their lines sown with inky words. I can’t decide. I’ll let the wind choose: whichever way it blows me, that’s the way I’ll go.
