David Foster Wallace gave me the best writing lesson I ever had in less than four seconds. It was the mid-90’s and he was a professor at Illinois State University where I was an English major. Sometimes I’d ramble at him about tennis or books while he listened politely. He had a reputation for being stand-offish
My grandparents took me to Hawaii when I was eight. We all wore matching blue floral shirts to a Don Ho show at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Before the concert started, a man in an E.T. mask came up and asked me if I wanted to be part of the show. I said Yes and
In Spring of 2009 I half-heartedly ran for RI City Council. Knocking on doors has never been my thing, and the incumbent was a decent man. It was an experiment. I was just starting to write the Lane Evans bio and wanted to see what it was like to run for office. And frankly, it
Last spring one of my best friends from St. Louis came to visit me. We gave each other a handshake, exchanged pleasantries, and then sat on my patio to chat and watch the birds. “Did I tell you about dressing up as Elvis for the St. Patrick’s Day parade?” I asked. “Yeah,” he smiled. “Well kind of,
Are all artists are now ice sculptors? Create, they admire, and its gone. A stadium of poets, screaming our verses to a single fan on the field. No true permanence in the land of distraction. Fifteen minutes turned to seconds. Tweets of Wrath. LOL. Why does a sand sculptor create, despite the tide? It can be for us and
Scully: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Seriously. That night Scully came into my life. He’d been a stray, living in my grandparents ravine for two weeks. I’d left out trays of meat and kibble doused with bacon grease. Slowly bringing the dish closer and closer to our house each night, hoping to lull