Just another writer
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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…
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An introvert at #AWP16—Day 1
Showing Up I discovered that my hotel’s breakfast was far from adequate, but knowing downtown L.A., I knew that there was a Denny’s between the 7th/Metro subway stop and the convention center so I stopped there for breakfast and a chapter of the novel I’ve been reading before facing the crowds. I expected to be…
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2015 in reading
Continuing my goal of last year to diversify my reading, I’ve boosted the goals for reading women writers and non-white writers. My statistics improved in both categories, with women accounting for 51.4% of my reading (compared to 39.6% last year and a target of 50%) and non-white authors accounting for 14.8% of my writing (compared…