I am pleased to announce that my short story Power was released this week in Issue 25 of the Ginosko Literary Journal. (For those of you who may be more inclined to listen to the story, I’ve also prepared an audio recording that you can stream or download.) This is a story about honesty, vulnerability and authenticity–qualities lacking in so much of the content that bombards us today. The images we encounter are cultivated with […]
I should give a warning here. Unless you’ve already read the book To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, after reading this post you’ll know a great deal more about it than you did before. I’ve tried not to give too much away, but of both joy and necessity I’ve said more than a little. I think regardless of what I’ve noted here, the wit and audacity of Ferris’s prose merits a read […]
I’m taking a brief break from the What I Believe series to announce that my short story entitled On a Night in Shelby County was named as an Editor’s Pick in this year’s Literary Contest at Solstice Literary Magazine, and was posted this weekend. I also learned a couple of weeks ago that a story I wrote this spring was a named finalist in this year’s Fiction Contest at Salamander Magazine. So little by little, […]
Writing fiction well is intractably difficult. You begin with maybe one or two bricks at the ready, stand facing an unruly forest that is neither for nor against you, but possesses all the density and might of any previously uncontested wilderness, and you are armed only with the vague feeling that a Taj Mahal-like structure of beauty and possibility is alive inside you. There really is no way to know where to place the first […]
This morning I finished George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which I greatly enjoyed. I enjoyed it not only for the quick flecks of prose that struck like the tongue of a benevolent snake; not only for the scenes of the self-evinced departed rummaging through their own private psychoses, e.g. the Bardo; not only for the utterly imaginative mechanisms and rules of the in-between to which they clung; but for the manner in which […]
I could suggest I’m grappling with writing—with the idea of writing, perhaps, and how the idea crumbles when I sit down to write; how I pan in the dust for gold and will myself to proceed though a dense and peculiar metal, of itself, is meaningless; how I come up dry and uncertain, but then find a sparkle or two in the half-light just as I turn away, and suddenly am renewed—but the real grappling is […]
As an update to my previous post, my second poetry book is now generally available. I checked and found it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and stopped there. Henceforth and until it no longer matters, if you live in the United States I would be happy to send you a signed copy for $17, including S/H, provided you are open to delayed gratification. If you live elsewhere I’m also happy to do it but […]
When I saw Linda’s Magnificence Challenge it gave me a moment of pause to think about how I might answer it, but it did not take long for me to recall a favorite quotation of mine I thought might get the ball rolling: “You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because this is what he […]
For Christmas this year I received a copy of George Saunders’ collection of short stories entitled Tenth of December. I had never heard of Saunders before, and didn’t know what to expect, but the giver of this gift– an inspiring young man securing his MFA in film directing with whom I’ve been known to occasionally watch Celtics games, make an Indian food run, or share a conversation in support of a draft screenplay in which […]
I have made modest progress over the past eight or nine months on the draft of a novel. If the 100k word mark is what puts you in the ballpark to being able to say a novel has been written, I’m just over 2/3 of the way there– sans editing. I have no previous experience in this sort of thing, but I figured the first and most important part was just to write and don’t […]
Embracing Forever 