I’ve been recording a solo album for the past year, with songs based on the characters and situations I wrote about in my Regis MFA thesis novel, ASK THE MOON. Each song is told from the perspective on one of the main characters, with my original music and lyrics. Come see me at Mutiny on …
This story is the anchor chapter in my manuscript, ASK THE MOON–a novel about friendship, sisterhood and the heartache and triumphs of musicians’ lives. The principle characters, Pilar and Goldy, grew up as step-sisters but grew apart after their parents split up. It’s their shared love and talent for music that continues to bond them …
Is Steven Spielberg a cyborg designed by Big Popcorn to sell product? Or a genuine artist driven by love of the craft and the pursuit of deep truths about the human experience? Both can be true, and THE FABLEMANS shows us how. It’s a masterpiece, and my favorite of all the films I wrote about …
The Pinch just published a short piece of mine, “Falcon Storm Song.” My very first published short story (“My Rockstar Life”) appeared in the same literary journal, back when it was called River City, in 2000. It’s good to be back home in the pages where I began. This piece is a kind of rhapsody …
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 …