Monthly Archives: May 2009

My mother and I were the last people Gavin named.  Early on, he named his father Da, and his grandfather Papa, and ultimately I became Mamama.  And then my mom started to freak. 

“What’s my name?” Became the peppered question. “What’s my name, little boy?” “Who am I?”… Read more

I’ve been fighting, in the current manuscript, against the inevitable. Until this morning, I would not admit that the occurrence was inevitable, that the characters had earned it.  For two weeks, I have resisted, and ignored, and written around, and tried to distract my characters,… Read more

Hey, Jane and Jane Magazine published the first review I’ve read for my new novel, A Field Guide to Deception, in the May/June issue of the magazine.  

Anyway, it’s damn sweet:

Review of A Field Guide to Deception

This afternoon when I picked Gavin up from school, I asked how his day was, and he said, “We were playing something in the gym with a ball, and I didn’t understand the rules, and I cried.”  

“What were you playing with a ball?”… Read more

I find the Modernist writers almost painfully boring, but I appreciate what they were after, and the struggle to get underneath the artifice of character to the truth of human experience—the rapid, wild seeking of the mind—the human condition in a single party.  I’d like… Read more

I had insomnia for three nights.  Historically, not so bad.  However, I used to be younger and recover more quickly.  And when sleep came, it came with plot and scene and appalling insight rather than rest.  So, I’m likely to fumble my language, likely to… Read more

Last night we raced cars down the hill of the driveway, and then trains around tracks, and then we raced one another, and then tricycles, and then we played chase.  Do you remember the constant motion?  

When we were kids we raced blades of… Read more