by admin | Jun 19, 2014 | News
War in Iraq is in the news again, although minus the definite article. This isn’t “the war in Iraq;” i.e., our war there, George W. Bush’s disastrous military adventure that started in 2003 and ended, at least officially, in December of 2011, having cost...
by admin | Jun 12, 2014 | News
In early February, I started a sweaty experiment in the privacy of my own home. Three times a week, without exception, no matter how I feel or what’s happening in my busy day, I change into t-shirt and shorts, strap on a pair of old sneakers, and slink upstairs...
by admin | Jun 5, 2014 | News
In the past, I’ve been known to apologize to Susan Marcus, who reads these columns out loud for Vision Resources of Central PA. There was the time I used a late medieval Hebrew term without providing any guidance on pronunciation. Susan was forced to guess how...
by admin | May 29, 2014 | News
I’ve recently been asked: where did my novel Marshlands come from? In 2008, when I first began to think seriously about writing a novel about the excesses of modern empire, we were 5 years into the military occupation of Iraq, with no real end in sight. We were...
by admin | May 22, 2014 | News
Typos bother me — a lot. But there are worse things. You don’t have to be a professional writer to be a stickler for the grammar that used to be called “correct” or “proper,” but that now goes by the much less judgmental moniker “normative.” “Normative”...
by admin | May 15, 2014 | News
Whenever I start moaning about the writing life — which happens a lot — my friend Garret is ready with a mantra: “You’re entitled to the work, not to the fruits thereto.” It may sound vaguely biblical, but the origin of this saying, which...
