Author at Large
I wanted to share my short story with everyone. It appeared in reSentencing Volume One from Tufts University. Enjoy: The Long Road to Fresno * After breakfast, I hike up a one lane road to the top of the bluff above the dorms of the prison camp. I’ve been assigned to work at the electrician …
I first heard of Chiara Barzini’s novel, Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, on the Los Angeles Review of Books podcast. Like a trip through a foreign country the novel has some rough passages and its beautiful passages that makes you stop and linger at the stunning landscape of sentences. Sometimes it distorts time, place, …
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Two things that are considered priceless are human life and master works of art. In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt weaves a tragic and wondrous spell of a boy who loses his mother in a domestic terrorist bombing at a museum. In the confusion, he listens to a dying old man who was with a young …
Denis Johnson’s last collection of short stories, published posthumously, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the crown for the dead king of writing about the addicted, the downtrodden, and those people who haunt the world while yet alive. Each story reminds me of the line Jim Morrison sang in “Roadhouse Blues.” “The future’s uncertain …
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Mohsin Hamid’s sentences in Exit West flow like a brightly colored fly line from a fishing rod’s guides in long iridescent and undulating curves and loops that feel breathless in the way a storyteller would tell a story with only minutes to deliver the message at the end of a long run might do, but …
Hello all. Yes. I am going to make a book trailer for my forthcoming fiction collection from SFA Press. Maybe I’ll make more than one. It is a collection after all. I will journal the process and post snippets as we go along. So stay tuned. Shipwrecks and Other Stories is slated for a September …
In Texas I taught film adaptation. We took a short story and adapted it for the screen and shot it. It was a great experience for most. Well you can’t please all the students and in the words of my old pal Wally Rovner: Writing is the only subject where the students think they know …
I thought I’d share this story that appeared in Narrative Magazine. I’ve been thinking of how I’ve grown as a writer and that this was the first story I wrote after grad school. What no workshop? Yeah. I did have my friend, Deb read it through and give me some feedback. Still, I figure it …
Me and Sten the notepad cruised to a local coffee shop and ended up in a bar downtown. That’s how we roll it seems. I anchored down a stool. Dark and long, the doors to the alley and street propped open letting a bitter wind blow through like lost hipsters, it felt the right place …
One semester in grad school we read for a nonfiction class two memoirs. One was Geronimo’s Bones and the other was A Million Little Pieces. It was quite a coincidence that during that semester they were both uncovered as frauds to one degree or another and that fired the debate about the truth in nonfiction. …