The Blue Heron, part 1 After two years, I wouldn’t say I’m in mourning anymore. I would say I feel a lack of closure about a few things, but I don’t even know what those “things” are. I would say I’m uncertain. Unsure of how to write about the night my mother died in August, […]
Some good news! An independent London publisher (Eyewear: The Black Springs Press Group imprint) has awarded me a contract for publication of my short story/essay collection entitled Throwing Tarts at the King. This book will launch in 2002 and includes material written back in the 1990s while I was a graduate student at the University […]
When my brother Paul died in 2007, my parents inherited one of his cats. He called it “Jooj,” which is pronounced as it looks. I don’t really recall my parents calling her anything. I thought I remember they renamed her “Priscilla,” but I never heard them say, “Come here, Priscilla.” I could be wrong. My […]
Good Grief – Thursday, September 19, 2019 It’s a month to the day since my mother died. Although I know intellectually what has happened, I’m not sure what just happened. I saw her on August 4, 2019, a Sunday. I was in the area both to see her and attend a birthday party for my […]
What you need to know when you read these entries is that I’m not making fun of my mother, or laughing at her, although I may be laughing with her. Dementia is such an awful thing. It robbed my mother progressively. First, she was told she couldn’t drive anymore. Then over time she grew unable […]
II. Qui es veritas?–Pontius Pilate “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.” “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to […]
September 2017 Chapter 1 As I turned left from Bayes onto Brown Road in Lakewood, the familiar, repetitive, beep-beep-beeping of heavy construction equipment didn’t strike my ears as unusual. A few years earlier, when my father was still alive, the city had demolished Roosevelt Elementary School, a red brick rectangular structure just a block away […]
Fireflies in the pot of coral impatiens blink when I inhale smoke.
cloak-room (n.) also cloakroom, 1827, “a room connected with an assembly-hall, opera-house, etc., where cloaks and other articles are temporarily deposited,” from cloak (n.) + room (n.). Later extended to railway offices for temporary storage of luggage, and by mid-20c. sometimes a euphemism for “bathroom, lavatory.” I had never heard the word “cloak” before I attended kindergarten, but I sure […]
Not a book excerpt yet, but a short story from my collection entitled Throwing Tarts at the King and Other Stories. This was written over twenty years ago in a writing workship while I attended the MA program in English at the University of Cincinnati. Loggerhead On the morning of their last day at the […]
scaredy cat ink 