Absolute Gentleman

I never told you about Arkansas.
I read a book called Arkansas, by John Brandon. It’s a McSweeney’s book (of course), but seriously, there are more than a couple of McSweeney’s books and stories I do not like at all. This one I liked, though. Brandon gave me my Denis Johnson, circa Jesus’ Son, fix without [...]

Mere minutes after my meeting with Chris Bachelder, he gave what the Conference called a “craft talk” on The Clock in Fiction. The thesis of the lecture was that most excellent stories have a “back wall,” or a point the story will not go past. In other words, if the reader (or the characters, for [...]

I had never heard of Noy Holland before the conference at UMASS, and didn’t know that it was, in fact, she who inadvertently flicked (flicked?) tossed her long blonde hair behind her, draping it onto my bare knees during the Bachelder/Davis conversation.
As a participant in the conference, I chose to attend certain “craft sessions” before [...]

Here’s an entry from the Juniper Writers Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. Alma Mater to many legendary scholars and thinkers, the greatest of whom being Doctor Marcus Camby. That boy can play, has played, ball. He a baller. He a Rhodes Baller.
I’m here and I feel out of place, which is [...]

I may have falsely made the reader believe that my days consisted of nothing but dropping the kids at school and daycare, then arriving at the studio with the intention of working every day. The truth is that I have a job — that the studio is a luxury of sorts, and I can access [...]