In the late summer of 2010, I went on tour with my band, Veronica. With my bandmates (Ted Thacker and John Call), I spent a week motoring across the frontier from Denver to Reno to SF to Eugene to Portland to Seattle and back home. It was a whirlwind of highway hum, gas station sandwiches …
These two short pieces, “An Unforgetting” and “The Music,” are experiments in minimalism. The first one uses only indefinite articles in short adverbial phrases, and the second does the same but with definite articles. Neither one contains a single complete sentence. Both revolve around music and its power to transport and transform. These pieces appeared …
I spent part of my childhood in Gunnison, CO, high in the Rockies where the wilderness outside town felt wonderous and terrifying. This story, “A Place for Losing Things,” is fiction, but draws on some of the adventures and fears of those days, and our long-lasting attachments to things we can’t quite name. Many thanks …
I’d already written a complete draft of a novel, SPACESHIP DAYS, about a generational starship leaving Earth on a mission to seek out sanctuary in another solar system. That novel took place entirely on the ship, the Running Bear, but my imagination kept returning to the unexplored storylines that lay before and beyond that epic …
The story goes like this: when the Devil tempted Jesus with all the power and beauty of the world, he brought him to the hill overlooking Barcelona and said, “All this, all this, I will give to you.” And Jesus hesitated. Who wouldn’t? I’d heard this legend years ago when living in the Catalan region …
Seeing that gross billionaire playing dress-up in a space suit and cowboy hat made something in me snap. Why should that guy get to live my dream, only because he can buy it? I know, I know–that’s how capitalism works. But art works differently, which is why I can write a story calling that gross …
Submissions to literary magazines: 249 Rejections: 184 Pending: 65 Acceptances: 4 From Chicxulub with Love in Fusion Fragment issue #18 Frankenthaler’s Blue in Five South A Place for Losing Things in Stanchion issue #13 Astronauts Fight Back! in Los Angeles Review Success rate: 2% Can’t stop, won’t stop!
This story was born from a visit I made to the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, where I spent a long time standing in front of a monumental canvas (Adriatic, 1968) by Helen Frankenthaler. Like many of her paintings, the effect was nearly overwhelming, creating sensations that seemed to ripple across all five senses. …
In the summer of 2021, I read a mind-blowing science article about how plants might possess some rudimentary powers of perception. It sparked me to write “Cottonwoods,” which turned into an almost unspeakably sad story, making me very happy. You cry, I smile. That’s just the way art works, man. I’m very grateful to the editors …
Is it a poem? Is it a story? Does it follow the rules of haiku? Does it break them? The answer to each of these questions is “Yes!” This was such a fun piece to write. I love working within limitations, and I especially love the concision and economy of haiku, but my natural mode …