Thursday, May 23, 2013

Live Reading, Friday 5/24/2013

I am the featured reader for LEMONSTONE, a program of the Writers' Guild at Bloomington, tomorrow night! Sweet Claire Bakery, on 3rd st. between Grant an Lincoln, in Bloomington, 7 - 8:30 pm. I will be reading 2 short stories from THE STRONGER, a story collection inspired by my grandfather's life and family tales.  

"The Last" - twenty-year-old Eli Swett is having a bad summer in 1879.  He thought he could make good money poisoning wolves on the Kansas prairie, but unexpected factors dog him, help him and defy explanation.

"Black Horse Fever" - A beautiful black horse and a rivalry between two country doctors turn a county upside down in 1902.

I hope you can be there!  I will have copies of YU: A ROSS LAMOS MYSTERY on sale at discount.


Monday, February 11, 2013

More Good News!

Just got word that "The Valentine" also won 2nd place in the Bacopa Literary Review's contest! *happy dancing*!

Monday, February 4, 2013

2013 Publication coming!

A short story of mine, "The Valentine," will appear in the print journal, Bacopa Literary Review, in spring 2013. 

In this tale, mismatched love blooms around a car crash in rural Southern Indiana.

Bacopa published my short story, "The Stronger," in 2011.

Further Rebellion

Rebelle Society has published another short-short piece from me, here.

As you might guess from the subject, I had had enough of Some People.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Serenely Not-Looking-For-It

I am open to the Blue, which great things fall out of.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

What I Read, Last Year

I originally posted this as a comment on Michael Glab's blog, Electron Pencil, but because it's about the books I read and loved in 2012, I thought I would re-post it here.

My list of fave books read in 2012 is short, mostly because there are a lot of books I started and got bored with, or had to return to the library because I had used up all the renewals and still hadn’t finished.

But I did read Her Fearful Symmetry (Audrey Niffenegger) and loved it. Splendid modern-day ghost story with some very sympathetic ghosts (familial and ectoplasmic) in London.

Shine Shine Shine (Lydia Netzer) is a 2012 novel that puts a fresh spin on the trope of husband-is-obsessed-with-work-and-wife-is-pissed. Husband is a Nobel-Prize-Winning robotics scientist and Asperger’s adult who is on his way to the moon. Wife is genetically bald, and loses her wig in front of the whole neighborhood. There is an autistic child between them, and one mysterious baby on the way.

I got through most of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Roberto Calasso) before I had to send it back to the Library. I will get it again soon. An amazing take on Western Civ, distilled through Calasso’s individual heart-mind-sex alchemy.

Read Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: the British Agent as a kind of prequel to the fabulous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John LeCarre) – which, come to think of it, is also on this list. I couldn’t get enough of the tricky film, so went to the source.

I also zipped through a classic sci-fi anthology from 1963: Short Science Fiction Tales (Asimov and Conklin, ed.s). I first read these in junior high and was warped for life — thank God. It was fascinating to see, in 2012, just how rigid the gender roles were in any kind of literature, especially SF, in 1963. In some respects, we’ve come a long way. But for the most part these tales are still fresh and disturbing looks at humanity in the midst of their beloved technology.

If I had ignored work and just read for the whole day on December 31st, I would have surely finished (and loved) Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in 2012.

Oh, I read a wonderful book on screenwriting, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. Funny and gripping, like a swell movie in itself. And dammit, Blake Snyder died in 2009. Dammit.

Do screenplays count?  Little Miss Sunshine was a fun read, and Michael Arndt's commentary about how the directors changed his script for the better is even more fun.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of those movies I never saw but hear about a lot.  Good script by Frank Darabont for a plot-heavy story, yet there is an enormous refrigerator moment at the end that I have not quite forgiven.  You know what a refrigerator moment is?  The director Jonathan Demme came up with this term.  It's when you see a movie, you're swept up in the movie, you drive home thinking about the movie, you get home, you go to your refrigerator and open the door, and it hits you -- "Wait a minute! That one thing -- No!  No Way!" But by that time you've been to the movie and had fun, so nobody really cares that you had a refrigerator moment.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked was a long good time; I'm warming up to his fiction after being spoiled by his book and music reviews for The Believer magazine. 

And of course there was Kate Chopin’s "sordid and depraved" 1899 novel, The Awakening, now lauded as a classic of feminist fiction, but reviled and banned upon its publication.  It ended Chopin's career, much to her distress.  After all, its themes and situations were ones Chopin had been writing about for years.  What happened?  My  take is, Chopin had hit a rare peak of skill at shifting point of view, and taking us into the subtleties of a character's changing consciousness.  She delivered such an enveloping experience of a woman who realizes that she doesn't really love her husband and children, and has come to the end of her options in the world-as-it-is … that people were just plain scared to death.  It was disturbing.  I read the book aloud for the new “Books Unbound” podcasts at WFHB Community Radio.  Click to listen.

And we're off to 2013!  I'm still working on Invisible Cities, as well as a collection of Calvino's non-fiction journals, Hermit in Paris. And I used my birthday money to get copies of Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.  It'll be a great year!

In Moonlit Bong

I have a short piece of fabulist fiction published here.

Rebelle Society is one of my favorite places on the Internets.  Go. Explore. Dream.

BTW: "moonlit bong" is an anagram for my hometown's name -- Bloomington.  Come visit, to find out how perfect that is. 

Thursday, January 10, 2013


"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." - Paulo Freire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

Perhaps to truly be neutral yet engaged, one must go among the powerless, appear to be as they are, and demonstrate humbly the great powers that are all around them, immediately at hand, if they would themselves set down that conflict. Kindness is one such enormous power. Imagination is the power that trumps all others, and in collusion with kindness and compassion, it invents the world anew.

I would draw attention to the difference between "washing one's hands of the conflict," and not engaging in that conflict while acknowledging that yes, it does indeed exist.

Choosing not to engage in a conflict - to not mirror the aggressive or passive-aggressive or entitled or co-dependent habits of those who are engaging -- opens up enormous spaces for alternative actions and new patterns of behavior, that make the conflict not only evidently boring but evidently obsolete.