If a cat can look at a king, then surely an unknown writer, such as myself, who is published by a press so small one needs a microscope to find it, may occasionally sneer at what passes for authors who write great novels. I refer specifically to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Ro

The Brautigan Library in Vancouver, Washington is the home of failed manuscripts. Here rejection doesn’t exist and, it would follow, it is the place where a writer needs no talent to be part of the literary community.  Such an institution is necessary, according to its current cura

As the end of the year rolls to a close, it’s time to think about New Year’s resolutions. Mine will be to take the advice of the Caterpillar from The Adventures of Alice In Wonderland. In my blogs I will endeavor to I say what I mean and to mean what I say. Too often in our haste,

On the day before Christmas, I’m thinking about the one gift that keeps giving: language. What fascinates me is the way we borrow words from other cultures to embellish our own. My latest novel, Trompe l’Oeil has a French title. Its meaning is less well known than words like rouge

Sometimes luck happens. I found a used edition of Alexander McCall Smith 11th novel, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, which I’ve been wanting to read. It’s part of his series about a lady detective who resides in Botswana and opens the first agency in her small country. As I l

In the December issue of More Magazine, Jan Sheehan observes that in some ways we get better as we grow older. One consolation she offers is that while we may have more trouble retrieving words, we know more of them. (“8 Ways Your Body Gets Better with Age,” by Jan Sheehan , More,

Mark Twain said of Rudyard Kipling, whom he admired, “I am not acquainted with my own books, but I know Kipling’s books.” (Hello Goodbye Hello, by Craig Brown, excerpted in The Week, 11/30/12 pg. 41). His remark surprised me the moment I read it. Surely this was excessive praise

During one of my coffees with a friend, I admitted I was thinking of going back to writing short stories rather than novels as the latter are time consuming and cost more to promote than what I earn in sales. My friend smiled sympathetically. Then she told me about a famous rock perfo

A little heralded event happened recently. Philip Roth, author of The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint — and one who has despaired for the direction literature — has decided to stop writing. His last novel, Nemesis was published in 2010 and at 78, he feels he has noth

A few years back, I wrote a fairy tale, Grimahlka, the story of a witch who adopts a human baby. The tale has a medieval, eastern European flavor and takes place in dark woods where, as it does in much of literature, transformations occur. The work was published in Tales of the Talism