I hear a lot about bad writing these days. Bad writing is what the surge in self-publishing has created. Without gatekeepers, anyone can be a published author; anyone can throw his hat in the ring alongside Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Anyone can publish. I won’t...
Dennis McFarland’s novel, Nostalgia, is an elegant, tortuous journey into the darkest corners of the human soul. The year is 1864. America is torn by its bloody Civil War. Young Summerfield Hayes, of Brooklyn, New York, alone in the world with his older sister, Sarah,...
My good friend and writing colleague, Nina Lorraine, has been having a hard time lately. She’s down in the dumps, uninspired, looking for a way forward. My heart went out to her, and I tried to give her some words of advice, consolation, at the...
Sam was a large girl, big-boned, her mother would say. Others called her heavy-set. And some just called her fat. Insults were Sam’s lot. Her name made it so easy. Sam crams spam and jam. She could go by Samantha, but that felt worse that the...
2013 was very good to me. I brought out a new book, learned a lot about how to use social media, and finished my novel, What is Found, What is Lost, which will be published by She Writes Press late in 2014. I had some...
SMOKE Ten years ago you got four, maybe five fires a season, but that month alone there’d been ten. Global warming was to blame. Some insect had moved north and killed off the Douglas fir. When lightning struck, those dead trees burned right away. A healthy, living...
Our Love Could Light The World (She Writes Press, 2013) was chosen as a finalist in the 2013 USA Best Book Awards in two categories: literary fiction, and short story fiction. ...
Recently, author Jonathan Franzen told The Guardian just what he thought of Amazon and what it’s done to both writers and book publishing. Suffice it to say, he wasn’t flattering. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is “decimating literary culture in favor of the yakkers and tweeters...
It Could Have Happened, by Nancy Hill is a gorgeous collection of short stories, each inspired by equally gorgeous black and white photographs, taken by the author herself. Consider these, as the book’s subtitle says, fairy-tales for grownups. Love lost, love found, fortunes gained, fortunes...
Paula Sophia’s novel, Shadowboxing, dares you to keep reading. This is a painful, tense, and authentic account of a young man’s struggle with sexual identity. Bill Guyles joins the Oklahoma City Police force after serving in Iraq. He has a girlfriend, albeit a particularly flaky...