Dec 16, 2012
Across the street from my apartment, men are building a house. Over the past month or so, I've observed through my living room windows one mysterious construction process after another. A steamroller ran over the old blue bungalow, and then a man in a… 
Dec 15, 2012
No, this is not some lurid account of the time I recapitulated someone else's work in such a thorough fashion that I deluded even myself as to my role in its authorship. (If you would like to read such a tale, pick up a copy of Tobias Wolff's Old School,…
Dec 14, 2012
"We wish you a Happy Crimble, and a very new year," John Lennon says solemnly at the end of some Beatles interview or another. I don't remember anything else about that recording, except I listened to it on the radio during my first real East Coast winter,…
Dec 11, 2012
How many times are we going to be promised an apocalypse? How many times are we going to be disappointed? Will I see Mayan death-gods descend from the sky in my lifetime? Are God and Satan ever going to scrap, or did they both chicken out? Maybe as winter…
Dec 06, 2012
Given the ways in which Christmas has colonized nearly every other aspect of life in the western world during the last six weeks of the year, one would think the world of literature would be no exception. The lifeblood of fiction is conflict, something…
Nov 30, 2012
Do you know the landscape of your writing? If you painted your writing style, put acrylic to canvas, what would the image show? Nearly half a century ago, an English professor at Rice University published a book of essays ruminating on culture and writing…
Nov 30, 2012
Dear Editor's Blog Readers, Most of us here at Gulf Coast and the University of Houston are gripped in the throes of a collapsing semester, its deadlines and crunch-time. We're writing papers, editing copy, grading portfolios, and trying frantically to…
Nov 26, 2012
A few weeks ago, an internet meme made the rounds that sparked a little too close to my woodshed: I can relate. Most people I know can relate. Why, I wonder. Why should we cry when we're only arranging words on a page, and there are no actual torture…
Nov 23, 2012
"Sometimes, you have to get up really high to understand how small you are. I'm going home now." With these words, on October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped off the dock of his helium balloon capsule and plummeted twenty-four miles to Earth. He fell…
Nov 20, 2012
When I was a kid, I used to watch the country-themed TV show, Hee Haw, with my father on Saturday nights. Hee Haw aired (in local syndication) for over 25 years. If you've never heard of Hee Haw (shame on you), picture Saturday Night Live in a cornfield;…