Just another writer
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Salinger Revisited: Just Before the War with the Eskimos
This is one of those Salinger stories that left me feeling, “huh?” There is the usual Salinger wit and sharp prose (certainly, this is one of my favorite titles for a Salinger story, even if the story itself is not completely satisfying). Wikipedia informs me that, “At the time of its publication, it confused yet nevertheless…
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Salinger Revisited: Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut
The story whose film adaptation is (at least nominally) the reason that there are no other films of Salinger works. The second of the Glass family stories, in this case with Walt Glass who appears only in recollection. Told almost entirely through dialog, it’s a good example of telling a story through indirection and omission.…
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Salinger Revisited: A Perfect Day for Bananafish
This was the first story I ever taught, in a class on Zen Buddhism I took as an undergrad (everybody in the class taught some topic for half an hour). It’s been twenty-six years, at least, so I don’t really remember the details although I think I only assigned the middle section, the interaction between Seymour…
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Salinger revisited: The Catcher in the Rye
I stopped reading Salinger over twenty years ago because I found myself being overly influenced by is voice. I’ve decided that I’ve developed a sufficiently strong voice of my own as a writer that I can allow myself a chance to re-read Salinger. My plan is to read the published books from Catcher to Raise High the…
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“Our Lady of the Freeway”: The Story Behind the Story
You can purchase a copy of Headland Journal No. 6 here to read “Our Lady of the Freeway.” This is a story I’ve been trying to write for almost thirty years. Preparing to write this post, I spent a bunch of time digging through my notebook covering 1988–1991 but didn’t find any trace of this, although…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 226 BIR The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus
There is a tendency for writing about the Bible to fall into two disjoint camps: there are the literalists who take the naïve view that the text is to be read without concern for its original context or creation, who end up reducing Biblical studies to an absurdity since the literal reading is untenable, not…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 211 ARM The Case For God
I’d heard of Karen Armstrong here and there and about this book, so I was curious to read a bit more about what she had to say. Alas, what I found was a lot of squishy theology of the all-religions-are-one variety. Having read God is not One a couple years ago, it’s clear that not only are…
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An introvert at #AWP16—Day 3
Invisible to Whom?: Black Fiction Writers on Craft and the White Gaze I had a long list of potential Saturday at 9a panels and realized that part of the reason that it was so long was that I wasn’t really excited about any of the options so I decided that this would be a good…