Essai
Sharp Sticks: On Plot Twists and Ironic Power
Why some of those shocking stories just . . . stay with us.
Unwoven Audiobook Available!
At last, the professional audiobook version is complete, with original music by Randon Myles and read by the author! Get it now from wherever you find your listens.
The Sestina and Me
I reflect on the completion of my wintry fingertrap sestina, “Whirling Still.”
Nuts & Bolts & Fingertrap Sestinas
Tensions, resistance, doubling-down, or just an itch to try and invent something? Either way, hybrid poetic forms are the real tradition of writing verse.
Daemon Maps: Suspicion of Metaphor
“All I need to know is if that low pressure system might create a tornado; stop telling me about the number of grandmothers per hectare!”
Daemon Maps – Repair Guy
Did they, in some coffee klatch somewhere, meet before marking this pathway to savings, to make a small quiet bet against themselves? Their kitchens were not my kitchens, their maps were not my reality, and they’d be damned if some commenters bombed their social media accounts.
Daemon Maps – An Introduction
We’ll call our exploration one of Daemon Maps, where any superior or superior inspiration guiding or discoverable by us (be it intentional, by D(d)esign, or by Law of Physics) is not necessarily ultimate, but graspable within our single local lifetimes.
Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey
“One issue with the defense of Twain’s original text is the claim that such an historical center exists and that such grounds are worth preserving.”
#bookfetish
After all, why would I risk staining that beauty with a coffee ring? Why place stress upon that carefully sewn binding? If I wanted to actually read the book, well, I have a chewed and annotation-scarred used paperback of it.
Lessons from Emilio
In the image, he is on the Inca Trail, alone, a floppy hat and sunglasses, his hands resting on the top of his walking stick as he waits for me to reach him. I am wheezing from altitude dizziness as we ascend.
Nazgul
After all, I was maybe 15 years old, skinny and pale as pasta, my “Lord of Chaos” badge hanging crookedly from a fading Dragonslayer t-shirt. And there was Gandalf, a 280 pound beer-stinking sasquatch of a man …
The Challenge of Finding Wisdom
I have seen years and scores of students succumb to the allure of Beavis and Butthead and Seattle grunge, Instagram and “What Does the Fox Say?”, never suspecting that Descartes’ dualism or Conrad’s “The horror” could be significant moments for true reflection.
To the Tower
I’ve always found power in creating story; it’s my way of creating the space I wish to inhabit.
Doing Battell
I suppose accepting the importance of internal conflict is difficult for any American boy. After all, I was taught to be strong. To write “reflectively” about “feelings” was, in 1978, a girlie thing to do.
Thumbing the Bird
Fortunately, as I have found in most places I’ve visited, people are forgiving. At least they were more forgiving than myself, who could not–for years–believe he had made such a mistake.
Pathos
I position my fourth finger on the high Eb just as my 3rd grade self learned from Ms. Schnute, my piano teacher from the 1970s. The damp dusts of her cramped basement studio pass through me; I hear her voice calling down from the kitchen where she does dishes: “Septuple! Septuple! Four and three!”
Essai –
After Michel deMontaigne, to essai is to engage in a prose act of skepticism, an exploration of a topic as perceived or understood by the writer. You might think of it as a “testing,” an experiment in idea-making. Alas, our education system long ago turned this critical verb into a static noun scored by rubrics in red ink for purposes political and often crippling.
