Category: Identity
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Map for a Forgotten Valley and 631
Dear Locals (and those traveling nearby) who will be around Youngstown on February 15th. I am giving a reading from my series of creative nonfiction vignettes called “Map for a Forgotten Valley”, along with a showing of Derek Jones’ short film “631”. Here is a blurb of what the evening will look like. Please click…
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Reality Hunger
I’m reading David Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. It’s a really engaging nonlinear, non narrative, at times lyrical essay, always structured by way of collage or mosaic, appropriating snippets of ideas from other writers, thinkers, poets, and philosophers and critics, arranging in a mash-up style, voices layered over one another without attribution (until…
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Important things
Drove north and east to visit Erie, PA today, where my writing pals Alan DeNiro and Kristin Livdahl were visiting Alan’s parents. Had a great several hours to talk and catch up with them before having to head back home (and them having to catch a flight back to Minnesota). But on the way home,…
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Prop 8
There is nothing wrong with you.
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Dreaming backwards
In another month and a half it will be three years since I returned home from Japan. Some days it feels as if I just got back. I’m not sure of what that’s an indication, other than my life became the busiest it has ever been for the past couple of years, and perhaps that’s…
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Literary Homemaking
Being a writer, I own lots of books. I’m sure there are probably some writers who don’t feel compelled to own walls and walls of books, and perhaps there are even some writers who have slowed down in their reading habits at some point in their life (though I would personally see that as having…
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Life with a house
I feel like I’m at the end of the strangest and somewhat stressful three or four months of my life. More stressful than those first few months of living in Japan even, getting used to a different culture. In the past four months, my first novel has come out, I’ve been teaching three classes at…
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Nature and Nurture
I think people sometimes take for granted the kind of environment they grow up in, and how it plays a part in shaping who they become. Of course we all know that’s a given, that we’re influenced by our environment, but I myself can sometimes get caught up in what-might-have-beens. Usually when people get caught…