Stories are expected to have twists. Some rule must be broken, a rule of social etiquette in a society story, a rule of physics in a science fiction story, a rule of law in a crime story. This expectation is…

My family's story was lost to me. There was noone to tell it. My grandfather died. My grandmother was lost. My father was incapacitated when i was six, and he died when i was twelve. Noone took my on their…

(Note - off prompt, just a continuation of yesterday) Jenna didn’t worry about those, not that she didn’t have them, but they paled next to the real ones. She dreaded going. She said: “Come back to me” and though that…

There are two versions of everything: what happened, and the story we tell ourselves. But it is the stories we tell ourselves that feel like living organisms, like poisonous vines that have emerged from the ground, absorbing everything in proximity,…

(Note: I'm using this writings to revise my novel in progress. Here's the opening of one of the characters.) “Looks like they killed off one of those fish,” my dad said, easing himself into the chemo chair. “What makes you…

From stories I have learned two things: One is I could have written something better than this (infrequent) and Two: How on earth does one ever conceive such a thing, put it together, think it up, write such beautiful prose?…

We called it the Haunted Hobbit Road. It was outside Edzell, Scotland. We were young American men stationed on Edzell during the Vietnam War. We were mostly drafted and could enlist in the Navy for four years and maybe not…