Category: writing

So I attempted to be a bit more focused in these last two months of the year, with minimal success: Read through We, the Rescued at least once and get my editorial notes in place: I’ve read 17 out of 29 chapters. I was hoping to have read the whole thing by now, but I think […]

Veo el perfil de Neruda y el mío, pero en realidad me engaño, es sólo un árbol, veo un árbol, la silueta múltiple y monstruosa de la hojarasca, como un mar que se seca, un dibujo que sugiere dos perfiles y que en realidad es una tumba al aire libre partida por la espada de […]

A week ago I saw a screening of the new movie, Eternity, which was a decent enough romantic comedy set in the afterlife.¹ I’m not going to write a review of the film itself, but instead there were two aspects of the afterlife as presented in the film that really captured my attention: First, the idea […]

I think at this point I may have been either on my way back to Chicago after dropping out of college or already there. I was largely writing down story ideas at this point. Plot line: a young man is dating a girl who cheats on him because he doesn’t have sex with her. The […]

My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a […]

This is a truly lousy month for writing progress. Even though I took a few days to take a mini-writing retreat at a hotel an hour away, I got very little writing done. My sole real accomplishment on the novel was doing some post-workshop revisions on chapter six (and workshopping chapter seven last night). My […]

I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent […]

I have three poems in the Autumn 2025 issue (Volume 51, Number 2) of California Quarterly: Museum of Broken Hearts Jubilate Mammonæ Carmen Philomelaicum The last is a translation of a Latin poem by Eusebius of Toledo, my first published translation.¹ I had read somewhere once that translating poems was an important part of the […]

Another poem from my Chicago Sonnets sequence is out in the debut issue of Big Score Lit. Despite being #42, it’s actually the first poem in the sequence and the one that inspired the project.  There used to be a newsstand near the Adams station of the “L” in the loop and I was always intrigued […]