Yes, We Have No Nirvanas I grew up wanting to be a writer. An only child who spent lonely afternoons and summers at the home of grandparents who lived in a neighborhood without kids, books and reading were (insert drumroll) my constant companions. Yawn. How many times have we heard those very words out of […]
Better late than never, and in acknowledgement of the new Phish album due next month, here’s a never-posted review of last year’s epic Halloween concert. — For the second time in four years, Phish, Vermont’s perpetually popular group of prog rock virtuosi, returned to Atlantic City for their typically-legendary Halloween run. Anticipation, through the roof; […]
But you know how that goes. In the writing game, it’s premature to call anything ‘done’ until the final product is published. In this case, by completion we mean that I’ve managed to get all scenes written for what I think of as the ‘second draft,’ but that in reality represents the first comprehensively detailed and finished version […]
From its initial silvery, widescreen, black & white frames, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska unfolds at an unhurried pace, much like the shuffling steps of its principal character, the taciturn, boozy, elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern, in a career-best performance). When we first meet him, Woody trudges along a freeway ramp up and out of Billings MT, but it’s […]
This list is bound to grow, and may in fact be incomplete already, but these are many of the songs that influenced and inspired the writing of DIXIANA. Like most of my fiction, songs are key: the narrative of the DIXIANA saga is on one level meant to mirror and echo the history of ‘hillbilly music,’ […]
Writing update: I’ve been mum about this work lately, but progress on my epic literary novel DIXIANA goes quietly and diligently onward. Since the first draft back in August, what was already a formidable text has now grown to the Wolfeian length of 315,000 words, with still quite a few small chapters, scenes, and moments […]
After a successful and stimulating Basics of Screenwriting course this fall, I’m energized to teach again during the winter and spring terms in the Midlands Technical College continuing ed program. The Fiction Writing course returns first, and then immediately after, we go back into scriptwriting mode.
An ocean of consciousness, but individuated nodes comprising our minds and bodies. We’re bobbing on the surface, mostly, or at times plunging to the depths, if we’ve taken up meditation, let’s say. But it’s difficult. We need solitude. Quiet. And time, in order to find ourselves. All good reasons to take a sailing trip around […]
Ah, the holiday season…! It’s that time when, for a month or so, this author’s other role as a small business owner begins to take precedence over the writing career. I’m sure most working writers will find it easy to sympathize with the necessity of keeping food on the table, roof over head, et cetera—these […]
So as part of my research for DIXIANA, a novel that’s steeped in both a literal and allegorical history of American ‘hillbilly’ music, I wanted to know about the time as a nine year-old that I attended the Grand Ole Opry. We’d gone to Nashville to have Thanksgiving with the Texas branch of the family, […]
