promise

Another flash fiction from my pal Merle Drown.

eco-terrorism, not

A dispatch from Beth Wellington, fighting the good fight.

cat and crow

All right, I’m a cat lover.  This is an amazing little story. 

tom swick

Newspapers continue to insist on their irrelevance.  I stopped subscribing to the Sun-Sentinel a year ago, but if I hadn’t then, I would now.  Tom Swick, a great traveler and compelling travel writer, came home from a vacation in Australia to learn he’d been fired and was told by the classy managers at the rag to clean out his desk.  Here’s an interview with Tom in World Hum.  And here’s a link to Tom’s book A Way to See the World.

interview

Here’s an interview I did with Pat Grant and Elisabeth Grant-Gibson on KMLB-AM’s Book Report while I was in Monroe this week.

gone to eat catfish

. . . and grits among other things.  I’m off to Louisiana and Mississippi–back on Saturday.

creative writing

From Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic: “Another way in which ‘Eng. Lit.’ could profitably reconnect to its evaluative roots is to move closer to creative writing programmes. Creative writing has proved an irresistible draw as a university subject in recent decades, perhaps satisfying the appetite of literature lovers for the sorts of evaluative approach they are unlikely to obtain in a conventional English department.  Unabashed as it necessarily is about evaluating literature, taught creative writing is an important arena for aesthetic judgment in a university setting.  Such judgements generally happen ad hoc, or as a means to an end. Creative writing programmes rarely treat criticism as ‘creative’. . . . But these programmes are nonetheless spaces in third-level institutions where literature is treated seriously as an end in itself, not just as an aperture to social or political context.  If English were to move closer to creative writing, it would highlight affinities between creative wnd critical writing, as well as helping produce close connections between critics and artists.  As movements like the Bloomsbury Group sugest, rapport between artist and critic can create energized contexts for artisitic innovation and creativity.”

requiem, mass.

In the Fort Myers News-Press.  In the LA Times.   

home again, home again

Just back from the Mass. leg of the tour.  Off to Louisiana and Mississippi in the morning.  Had a wonderful time at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, at Sal’s Cafe in Worcester, and at Tatnuck in Westboro.  Be back online Friday or Saturday.

today’s short story waiting to be written

Siblings leave Mom’s body to rot for seven years.  “A 100-page state police case file, recently released to the newspaper, details how the brother and sister made biannual trips to their mother’s Middlefield home, stepping over her mummified remains on the floor.”