Category: Uncategorized

I saw a coyote on my run tonight. Here are three clear photos of the coyote and one photo of a cryptid

Something is Coming and Wants to Get By

I won’t talk about my childhood yet because if you describe something wrong or incompletely then you have done something terrible to your relationship with it—at least your word-relationship with it. And my childhood is the real center of my self, the absolute garden, from the outside bar-shaped, torso-shaped, and within a very beautiful wave […]

One Hundred Thousand Fireflies Taught Me How to Write Short Stories

I have just learned of the death in 2021 of Susan Anway, who sang 100,000 Fireflies. I am moved almost beyond saying. I learned to write in 2007 when I was seventeen. I had decided when I was sixteen that I would certainly be a writer and although I had been writing with most of […]

Six Stories I Think About

An image or a line which is in reality a small rock or a sea-glass—which is not like a small rock to one reader but which is of its own power a smallest-unit of uniqueness—is a real artifact of art. It is a real shard off the meteor, so to speak. This is the good […]

I Hate Genre Painting

Every day for all my life I encounter and dismiss the pose which runs “haha modern art is bad”. Every part of it is gibberish, from the personality which undergirds it, to the crazily misapplied language, to the fact that at the very latest this is an idea got from approximately the year 1954. You’ll […]

Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei

Agnus Dei, Francisco de Zurbarán, c. 1635-1640. San Diego Museum of Art (California) In honor of Easter Weekend, following is an excerpt from my long-delayed chapbook about animal-human transformations in art. If I can arrange for even modest distribution, I will print it this summer. Hatch of feet, 2 back through 2 front. Shadow up […]

Offramp

This is a fairy tale about Southern California Kelly walked out on a hot day. At the end of the road there was a house being rebuilt. Its driveway was turned up into corners of big gray stones. On the sidewalk out front lay two construction workers. Kelly crossed the street to give them space. […]

House of Sleeping Beauties and No-heart

This was my first time reading House of The Sleeping Beauties. I bought it sometime last year but the timing was poor, since I’d just had surgery and was reading it while insomniac and full of stitches, and eventually had to put it down halfway through. I’ve just read it through now. I think it […]

It was so much fun creating art for Meat for Tea magazine‘s virtual issue release earlier this month. I also read my poem “The Fulfillment House”, originally published in MfT’s ’19 issue. I’ll always be grateful to MfT for picking up that poem, which I think is a very good one, and which I was […]

Absalom Waits for an Interview

Here is a second excerpt from the 2017 or 2018 story I excerpted in my previous post. Here, a painter named Absalom sits in a hotel room. Because this passage was originally split between two different chapters, I’ve added an ellipsis where its original break occurred. As Palomar opened the window in Prague, Absalom asked […]