My friend and long-ago college tutor Randy Fertel is writing a follow-up to his well-received book of essays, A Taste for Chaos: The Art...

Just before the pandemic shutdown, I visited my friend in federal prison. A couple weeks before that, I’d sent him a copy of my debut...

I don’t know if this is true for everybody, but the popular singers I care about feel closer to me than some people in my family. I’ve...

For years, I’ve considered this day on the calendar my own New Year’s Resolution reset – March 4th, the answer to the riddle, “What day...

Everyone on tv and social media seems to be squabbling over facts, fake news, and truthiness, but few of us seem to have read the...

For what it’s worth, here are the ten books I most enjoyed, learned from, dug to the max in the past year. Only one is new, but they’re...

2019 is the year I came out of the closet as a writer of fiction.  Published a novel The Coal Tower (https://amzn.to/2DvSTcZ), which I’d...

November 2018 – Visited author friend Katy Munger and her daughter Zuzu in Durham, where over a bottle of champagne, she showed me how to...

I have a friend who, through some combination of depression, online curiosity, and bad choices, has found himself in a low security...

My best friend John Wahl and I were on a Southern culture road trip, driving my girlfriend’s boaty 1970s-era Oldsmobile along the...

Endless Wall Trail (New River Gorge National River, WV) Just a couple miles away from the New River Gorge Visitors Center in West...

As I was selecting the dozen tales for my debut story collection Last Rites, I imagined sequencing a record album, seeking both an...

So, I read about this thing where writers leave their books for people to pick up and read wherever, and thought it might be fun. In...

Visiting the Outer Banks this weekend to hang out with son Nick, who’s ocean rescue life-guarding for Nags Head again this summer, and...

Here’s my Top Ten list of favorite books read in 2018 (all are in paperback and only one was actually first published this year).  I’d...

Last Summer, I was grateful to learn that a pair of my poems had placed in a competition held by the Virginia Poetry Society.  A few...

Finished Dharma Bums, its final rapturous rush as Kerouac’s protagonist (clearly and baldly autobiographical) packed a Summer on a...

My friend Corey lives three hours away, yet I get down to see him just two or three times a year. He never comes to see me, and it will...

As a joke, I used to take snapshots of bedraggled storefronts emblazoned with the first names of my friends, and send them off as pasted...