The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. – Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye. Page 53.
Read MoreReformed Journal published a couple of my poems and were kind enough to host me on their weekly poetry podcast to talk about “Hawk Lies Down With Rabbit.” Listen here if you’d like.
Read MoreTo experience a story like that, you can’t be looking for connections with Dante. You can’t be thinking. You have to be drawn into it. You have to come away from your story and say, “Boy, that story made me hungry. It was hot where I was. And it was isolated, and the wind blew […]
Read MoreIn the modest stillness of your heart you must cherish victorious truth, display it from within yourself in Beauty, so that not merely thought may pay homage to it, but sense too may lay loving hold on its appearance. And lest by any chance you may receive the pattern you are to give it from […]
Read MoreI’m preparing Season Two of my email newsletter “In Solitude, For Company.” Newsletter is a misnomer. There will be very little news. In fact, it’s kind of anti-news. You can expect essays about some old things, especially literature. Here’s what to expect over the next few months: Andre Dubus’ “A Father’s Story” is one of […]
Read MoreEkstasis Magazine published a new double sonnet called, “My Wife Doesn’t Like These Sonnets.” She does like them though, so I guess I’m lying to you. Read it by clicking on the picture.
Read MoreThe new regional press Belle Point Press published its inaugural work, an anthology of regional Mid/South (Not quite Midwestern, or Southern, or Southwestern) writers. They included my story “Plaster Madonna.” You can order your copy here if that first page hooks you.
Read More…[A]rt, while it cannot of its own power enforce any alteration of consciousness or morality, can help those who would be joined together to find their desired unity. Artists can never become the legislators of the world, acknowledged or unacknowledged, but they can become after a fashion public servants. Yet even this they can do successfully only […]
Read More“Regionalism, cultural regionalism, is not an antiquarian fad like the cult of the hillbilly. It is contemporary, and it deals by preference with the usual rather than with the unusual, with the essentially normal rather than the picturesque, with cultures which are continuous and vital rather than with the isolated and the moribund. It is […]
Read MoreDon’t forget: In “Listen to Her Heart,” Tom Petty rhymes: Behind her and my girl. Don’t take it all too seriously. Language is fun.
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