Good evening, fellow classmates. I’m very please to appear before you to present my five-minute “how to” speech in Speech 112 this evening. I know many of you had a long day at work, so I’m going to be brief and to the point. I had a day off today, but that don’t mean I […]
Last night I had a dream That the world had turned around And all our hopes had come to be And the people gathered ’round They all brought what they could bring And nobody went without And I learned a song to sing The revolution starts now. —Steve Earle Don Imus hated the title of […]
ghost town Out of nowhere, I did what I ought not to. I thought of the girl I loved, waited for my chance, then robbed the liquor store where I worked. I got in my car, sped away, imagining the howl of sirens where no sirens were. The highway itself was dark as hell and […]
Chapter 1: Paradise I stood knee-deep in the foamy surf, shading my eyes and looking out over Escondido Bay for any sign of a dorsal fin. A strong riptide pulled on my ankles, burying my feet in sand. Up and down the glistening beach along the overgrown weedy foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains, Norte […]
How did you come to choose Puerto Escondido, a small Mexican beach town, as the setting for most of your debut novel? When I was in college during the mid 70s, I did a lot of traveling in Mexico—maybe five or six trips, each one for about two weeks. This was before the proliferation of […]
Both Headless and your previous book, Dear Dead Person, are comprised of stories, often very short ones. What draws you to writing stories rather than, say, novels? And have you ever written longer fiction pieces? I just started writing a novel and I’m kind of out of my mind excited about it. Progressing quickly. All […]
MARNIE The first time I saw Marnie naked, she was lying on her back in an ambulance while two paramedics cut her yellow Burton shell off her torso. The zipper must’ve been caught on the fabric. The medical boys sliced her jacket and all the fleece underlayers right up the middle with a razor-sharp scissors […]
Chapter 1 The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat. We were in her crappy car and singing, and at the end of the song “White Riot,” the one by the Clash, I realized by the […]