If you look at a map of Southern Italy, you see the spur of the boot (too high-backed to be of use to a working cowboy) sticking some forty miles out into the Adriatic Sea. And in the center of this spur is the dark and looming Monte Gargano where, in the year 493, a […]
ORIGINS OF A TITLE, or: FRENCH QUARTERS is Not Just About the French Quarter Read More »
When one bright morning I open my eyes and look around and find myself waking up in the thistly, chigger-ravaged cusp of a 3,000 acre working ranch and wildlife preserve, I experience the process of “life change” in what is known in music and dance and rate of pay (as well as, drill-sergeant jargon) as
Finding Your Place on the Food Chain Read More »
Having worked in the corporate world for as long as I had, I knew (or at least felt) a good thing when it came my way. For years I had done what many writers do to make ends meet. You work the day job, or the night job, or the bits-and-pieces jobs, and you write
As Been Said, Sometimes You Just Gotta Go For It Read More »
Another story from my Tales of the Late Twentieth Century is one entitled “The Blue Light.” With the previously mentioned “Point Arena” it forms a sort of duology, fictionalizing at least one perspective of my military experience. This pair of stories may be the closest thing I would refer to as autobiographical; although, as a
In my short story collection Tales of the Late Twentieth Century is one entitled “Point Arena”. It is written in a somewhat fragmented, episodic, almost collage-like style that mirrors (at least, in my own mind) what it was like being a young soldier stationed at a very remote and isolated Northern-California radar station in the
In Germany, at the height of the terrorist alerts, and during the most ferocious snowstorm I had yet witnessed there, we went on deployment again. The sirens rang at two a.m.; the alert drivers stumbled from their bunks, got dressed like unhappy Eskimos in their fur-lined parkas, hopped in their jeeps, and drove out every
A Story I Never Believed Read More »
Terrorism was as much a part of my time in Germany as warm beer. There was the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen, or RZ), and other splinter groups, copycat wannabes, until it became hard to keep track of who was blowing up whom. My German
When I was a boy, my family moved to a dilapidated old fishing camp, north of San Francisco and at the south end of the Napa Valley, called Cuttings Wharf. I never went back after we moved away, but I would guess the place is only a memory now. However, when we arrived there, in
I’ve read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front several times in my life. The first time, I recall, I was a boy, living in an isolated fishing village in the Washington Puget-Sound area. There was a tiny library in the village and, for the time my family lived there, I think I
Nothing New in the West Read More »
Reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches was an epiphany for me. I read it several years after I was discharged from the military, and was either making one last attempt at dealing with the cloistered, self-involved world of academia or, more likely, wandering about somewhere. But I do remember thinking the book cover looked pretty cool when
Connecting the Dots Read More »