Listening for the birdsong
A big thank you to Joan Dempsey and her assistant, Aja Rutledge, for featuring me in the Gutsy Great Novelist Writer Studio, “a private online space where serious creative writers gather to finish their novels.” Membership is nearly 1,800 writers as of August 2022, and growing. The following exchange with Aja first appeared on the GGNWS website and is presented … Read More
My wife and I had family over for Easter, ranging in ages from my 93-year-old mother-in-law, to the nine-month-old baby boy of our nephew and niece, and every age group in between. Four generations. Like many families, we’re spread out throughout the U.S., and on my side of the family, throughout Spain as well. Because of distance, we see each … Read More
Well, not quite, though it kind of felt that way for the past three and a half years as I sat down at my laptop most mornings to write Beneath An Alien Sun. What takes the reader days to complete often takes the writer years to develop. The stakes are high. Every writer’s effort invariably leads to the Page One … Read More
I work in a long narrow two-story government building.* The cubicle is sometimes prison cell, sometimes cloister, like the mind. Spinal compression, unlike 401k plans, compounds faithfully. When the back groans too much I get up and take my walk. I walk from one end of the building to the other with purpose. The corridors are adorned with stylish prints intended to … Read More
I took the opportunity to stop in the old neighborhood to have lunch at Casa Galicia while on business back in August of 2015. A flier pinned to the wall got my attention as I walked in the entranceway. Lucas Amado, whom I hadn’t seen since high school, was giving a talk on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood at the Legacy … Read More
A novel in one sentence? If I absolutely had to describe the novel in one sentence, it might be something like this: Disillusioned young husband struggles to save marriage and sanity after getting involved with cheerful, albeit increasingly erratic and mystifying, middle-aged woman he meets at work. There’s more, of course. Mr. Galaxy’s Unfinished Dream is also a tricky love … Read More
While trying to come up with a title for my second book, No Other Pearl, I came across this quote from Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables: “To love or have loved, that is enough, ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” It’s an interesting metaphor, and one that is at … Read More
No Other Pearl brings together nine rare, illuminating short stories about everyday human beings entangled in the hard battlefields of love and death. No fairy tales in the dark folds of life. But to endure the worst and persist, just maybe is to find new life and discover who we are. The Battlefield – A woman struggles to make peace between … Read More
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. What is the point of being human? This is a question Miller wrestles with in Canticle, and the question he wrestled with for much of his life, particularly after serving in World War II as part of a bomber crew that destroyed the ancient Roman Catholic monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy, … Read More
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russel You could read The Sparrow purely as an entertaining and disturbing Sci-Fi story that is so intricately woven that you almost believe the planet Rakhat, and its inhabitants, the friendly Runa and the menacing Jana’ata, are as real as we are. You could do that, but you’d be missing a whole lot. The novel … Read More