Writing About The Elderly
Hannah, my chocolate Lab, a main character in Where The Trail Grows Faint, will be thirteen next month. Our forays into the woods have changed, although she still shows me that she wants to go by following me to the door in the late afternoon when I get up from...
Lunatic
Sometimes I remind myself of the Don Quixote of our yard. He's a lunatic robin doing valiant battle through this long and glorious spring. I can't believe he hasn’t killed himself yet. When morning is only a soft charcoal suggestion, he begins flying into the first...
Buy From Bricks And Mortar Bookstores…Please!
Do you order your books from Amazon? I often do. The independent bookshop in my small town closed long ago, and the university bookstore here focuses on student needs and best sellers. Amazon is less expensive. It’s convenient. Reviews are posted, and sometimes...
Mercy (an excerpt from a novel-in-progress)
I hope the deer was the last thing Cory saw, not the pickup truck careening toward him, and I hope his eyes were wide and soft with pleasure. We’re here to teach our children and grandchildren, I know that. But sometimes we see things through their eyes and...
On Hunting and Metaphor
IN SEASON I need bullets, he said, only one left in the chamber, and headed toward the house when by chance I spotted it in the back field, near the woods that drop down to Rush Run, the creek like a vein through our farm, and shouted to him, though a shadow...
Men Are Hilarious
My 97 year old father-in-law has always said, "One boy is one boy but two boys are half a boy." He doubtless developed this theory because he had two sons 18 months apart. After five years of that fiasco, he and his wife must have been desperate to improve the...
Do The Right Thing Even If You Look Like An Idiot
Have you ever tried to do what you were pretty sure was the right thing only to have it explode? Even have two other seemingly sane and intelligent people tell you yes, you should do it before you went ahead and did that thing that exploded? So here's the story. It...
“Make It Mean Something”
The sky and air felt charged this week when I walked Hannah and Maggie, the chocolate Labs. The moon was already up while the sun hung low and cool in a fading denim sky. Too early for twilight! The scent of crushed leaves was strong as the dogs hunted in the dry...
On Zusak, Gadhafi and Surprise
An unexpected ludicrous moment, a twist into tragedy, a flash of tenderness: surprise by a character is a crucial element of a riveting story. Speaking yesterday at the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, Marcus Zusak discussed this as well as...