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Showing posts from 2016

15 Bytes Book Review

Published my first literary book review, of Bev Magennis's Alibi Creek,   in Utah art magazine 15 Bytes. You can find it here . 

The Dog Post

Let's get something straight: I'm not a dog person. This is thanks to many traumatic moments as a child being chased by the evil Schnautzer across the street, and being terrorized by the Cocker Spaniel on my paper route, and especially thanks to the German Shepherd two doors down who wanted to kill me, and maybe even a little because of the wolf which the German Shepherd people had for less than a week, possibly, until the rumor went around that it had taken a bite out of a child. I was terrified of dogs. Especially big ones. Especially German Shepherds. Also, I am a germaphobe. Dogs are germ factories. This is not to say my family didn't have a dog of our own when I was growing up: a sweet-tempered little wiry-haired mixed-breed terrier born in the hollow at the base of our cherry tree when I was five. He lived under the plum trees near the garden and his name was Skippy. Don't make fun. We got it from those Dick and Jane readers (my brother was six and learning

Revising My Tongue

You know those times when somebody asks you a question and everything depends on a decent answer, and somehow what comes out of your mouth is the opposite of what you meant to say? And as soon as you say it, it's out--you can't take it back--so you have to talk around the idiotic thing you said so it sounds like something different from what you actually said--opposite, hopefully, but what you really need is to have un-said it. To stuff it back in your mouth where it came from. Along with your foot. Because it certainly didn't come from your brain. This happened to me a few weeks ago. It was a job interview for a teaching position and the question was one of the easiest questions they could have asked a novelist: "What is your personal revision process?" I spend my life writing and then revising what I write. And also suggesting ways for other people to revise. I know my process. This should have been my dream question, the one that sealed my chances for a

February Survival Guide

Anyone who knows me at all, or at least reads this blog, probably knows February and I don't play nicely together. This (in spite of anything I might have said in the past) has nothing to do with Valentine's Day, which is, after all, a cute, little holiday full of chocolate and flowers and little love notes...even if the mall (and yeah, ok, everywhere else you go) can't help celebrating with bad colors and trying to pass off eroticism as romance. I don't have to go inside the mall if I don't like it, do it? Especially since See's candy has moved out to a larger store in the parking lot. I tried to analyze what happens to my brain in February, and traced it to a lack of light, built up since about November, mixed with soupy-orange air caused by natural winter valley inversions and a lot of industrial smoke stacks and of course way too many cars on the road. Plus usually some bronchitis or flu. Or both. The view from Sundance, looking down into the polluted v