Monthly Archives: May 2009

We arrived at the Lambda Literary Awards just in time to find out that I’d lost. But it was a hell of a show, and quite a trip.  In other curious news: my new book, A Field Guide to Deception, has been postponed until October.  … Read more

Shelly asked for a poem, so here’s one I wrote for my graduate thesis.

Express

On a train to anywhere.  I run from the water and the haunting shriek

children make in the sunlight.  Past my picture window

summer days slip like cinders, hover in … Read more

Is there a Bermuda Triangle of broken stuff too?  I have two broken shoelaces, and a watch at the repair shop that won’t be fixed for two weeks. (Two weeks without my watch is not OK. I shower and sleep with my watch on.  I … Read more

You learn to monologue early.  You tell the infant, as you change his diapers, stories from your childhood, what the pets have been up to. You sing him songs about his feet, and a dish running off with a spoon. You exclaim and point whenever … Read more

I read Jesus’ Son last week, and felt, again, the power of those stories. The loneliness, the mad adventure, and the despair.  Denis Johnson writes from the scary, naked places that most of us hide.  Our embarrassing, broken places.   He shapes prose with poetic tools, … Read more

Where do we get our anxieties from—are they inherited?  Did we learn them in our childhood?  Were we predisposed to certain neuroses?  Were they nurtured into us, or did we stumble upon them?  

Last week, Gavin woke crying.  I went into his room, and he … Read more

Gavin caught a frisbee with his eye Thursday night, and came away with his first shiner, underscored by a red cut across his cheek.  Friday morning, when I woke him, he looked like he’d been stung, but announced that it didn’t hurt a bit.  We … Read more

I can’t tell you what month it was, or season for that matter.  Late summer maybe, but it happened in Cheney, at the big white house with the green shutters; the only civilian house we lived in during my childhood.  Dad had the year on … Read more

I can’t stop listening to the new Silversun Pickups’ album Swoon, except for brief pauses to hear Tobias Wolff read Denis Johnson’s short story Emergency, on this month’s New Yorker fiction podcast.

Denis Johnson used to come to Spokane’s literary festival, Get Lit, in … Read more

John Keeble discouraged us from writing perspective characters from another race.  He thought, in most cases, we’d fail miserably.  Get the truths and subtlety wrong.  Ursula Hegi, on the other hand, loved manuscripts that tested gender or race.  She felt that believability was the test.… Read more