Here’s the grim news: this the bad economy has hit the venerable SC Writer’s Workshop annual conference in the pocketbook, and in a serious way. This is one of the most well-run and -respected writer’s conferences in the country, and while they will be sure to figure out a way to soldier on with the […]
As this article makes so dreadfully clear, my novel DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, about a woman’s crusade against the backwoods dogfighters she discovers living next door to her new country home, features a platform and basis very much rooted in reality. As the author of a novel that makes clear its moral stance when it […]
Out of my many unpublished pieces, ‘Patterns of Recognition’ (not to be confused with William Gibson’s very fine novel Pattern Recognition) is one of my personal favorites, but along the way acquired a few rejections. Very happy this morning, however, to report that it’s been accepted by online journal Fiction365, which publishes a short story […]
It’s not every day a writer gets an invite like this one: — In its nearly three centuries of existence, The Saturday Evening Post has published short fiction by a who’s who of American authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dorothy Parker; William Faulkner; Agatha Christie; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ray Bradbury; Louis L’Amour; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; Ann […]
With a number of awards and advancement opportunities coming my way, 2012 landed for this humble independent writer as a creative and professional benchmark: As a now-agented author with a new small press novel in print and another extremely commercial MS resting on publisher’s row hard drives, the possibility is strong that I’ll soon land a […]
RED HOOK SUMMER (2012) A Spike Lee Joint Dir: Spike Lee Scr: Spike Lee & James McBride A quasi-sequel to the director’s accomplished Do The Right Thing, one of 1989’s most controversial and memorable films, Spike Lee’s independent Red Hook Summer unfortunately conveys little of the narrative drive and heat of the prior film.
Here’s a link to an interview promoting my writing career (as well as my family’s retail business, Loose Lucy’s) that I did on the WOIC/1230 AM ‘U Need 2 Know” radio program. Frank Knapp’s show is a mainstay of Columbia afternoon drive time, and I was duly honored to be the final guest of 2012!
REVIEW (blu-ray): HEAVEN’S GATE (1980) Dir-Scr: Michael Cimino A United Artists Release An indelibly maligned and misunderstood masterwork of New Hollywood cinema, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (that’s the title in big letters on the spine and cover) has received a November, 2011, blu-ray restoration and critical reprieve courtesy the ever reliable Criterion Collection, and it’s […]
DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012) Dir-Scr: Quentin Tarantino A Weinstein Company Release A malformed pastiche comprised of equal parts loving movie homage and barbarous, bloody commentary on the dark violence in the American past and sometimes present, movie geek hero Quentin Tarantino’s latest work is a piece of flawed cinematic art that nonetheless demands attention and critical scrutiny.
After nearly a decade of writing, learning, writing some more, trying and failing and finally failing better — i. e., getting published in my modest but gratifying ways — in 2009 I came up with the idea of leading others on the path of the kind of discipline and thinking I’d cultivated in order to get […]
