Category Archives: personal

Storm Junkie

A love of thunderstorms runs in my family, or at least on Mom’s side of the family. From my earliest days, before we even had cable so the Weather Channel could let us know what to expect and when (as much as weather forecasts are ever accurate), the arrival of a thunderstorm at our house often meant gathering in the living room, so we could look out the big windows as the clouds darkened and then flashed with lightning. Especially in the years before the…

Read More »

The Air Up Here

Mom was, by anyone’s standards, extremely devoted to those of us in her blood family. Although her parents were hoping that she could turn her musical talents into a full-time career when she was in her teenage years, that never really came to pass, especially after she became pregnant at nineteen. I can’t speak much to the first ten years she was a mother, because I hadn’t been born yet, but she often did everything she could, and usually more than she should have, to…

Read More »

The Toner Prices Are Too Damn High

Although I try to write as much as I can every day, some days, and some years, just turn out better for me in that regard. At the beginning of 2010, when I was in the middle of a period of peak productivity (including writing the short story that would eventually become my first novel, The Prostitutes of Lake Wiishkoban), I quickly realized that my old inkjet printer was costing me a mint as I kept replacing ink cartridge after ink cartridge when they ran out.…

Read More »

Holding On to Dreams

Dolores O’Riordan, the Cranberries Singer, Dead at 46 (Rolling Stone) Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered on the final Friday of my last spring break in high school. I can still remember waking up late that afternoon (it was spring break, after all), and turning on MTV when they were supposed to be airing their daily top ten video countdown. They were in the middle of Nirvana’s Unplugged performance of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” which was certainly a great song and video, but…

Read More »

Is That All There Is?

Although my early years were spent in the tail end of the Cold War — I was already a teenager when the Berlin Wall came down — I wasn’t educated about the threat of nuclear war when I was younger. I never took part in any drills about what to do in the event of a bomb strike, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood what all that “Duck and Cover” stuff was really about. (Strangely enough, my first taste of…

Read More »