Story

I splurged on myself once, and spent a week in Iowa City at the Iowa Writers Program Summer Workshop. Very different from the famous one, but it was very good, and the class was led by Robley Wilson, then editor of the North American Review. The workshop was about a dozen people, and it was … Read more

I have just added an article that was a speech I delivered for Toastmasters. The speech is called: “The Black Dog Shall Have His Day,” and is memoir-ish and the kind of thing I like to blog about. It’s about an aspect of my emotional intelligence that was, heretofore, only privy to my classmates from … Read more

The estate sale started at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning. Things had been pulled out of the house and arranged on tables. People from all over the neighborhood came to see what was there, the things from the house that no one visited. There were other people, too, just for the sale. But those … Read more

The first short story I ever got all the way through and kind of liked was “When It Rains“. I had written a few others before then, and even entered one of them in the Hopwood Awards annual contest at the University of Michigan, but I didn’t win. At the time, I was very hopeful: … Read more

When I was but a boy, the West Side Market in Cleveland was a place of great mystery. My mother spoke of it in hushed awe as if it were sacred, or at least nearly sacred. The vendors there carried the run of the mill produce and meats of any market, but also some of … Read more