Those of you on my social media feeds got the news today that I’ve been shortlisted for this year’s Dundee International Book Prize for my first yet-to-be published novel, The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. Since not all of you who are reading this may be familiar with the story so far, please allow me to catch you up. Early in 2010 I experienced a spurt of story ideas, most of which I was able to get down into some kind of short story. At the time…
I swear, if I had the money right now I’d hire someone to beat me about the head with a loaf of whole wheat bread if I go a week without updating the .org, let alone over a month. Anyway, back in April I announced on my Twitter and Facebook that I was moving to Cleveland this summer, and that I’d post a .journal entry about the whole thing in May. This is, in a way, the culmination of something I’d been working on since…
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Remembered After 100 Years (DNAinfo.com) Almost every semester I teach, at some point in the term I have reason to bring up the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire in the sixties. The reaction from my students is always the same: “What? How can a river catch fire?” When I explain to them how polluted the river was and call up some Google Images photos of the fire, though, they seem to understand. (As I teach in Michigan and nearly all my…
Pa. teacher strikes nerve with ‘lazy whiners’ blog (AP via Bloomberg BusinessWeek) I haven’t been paying much attention to news and politics lately, in part because I’m so busy with writing projects right now, and in part because I’m just getting so frustrated with it all. For a while I seemed to have much more patience with those who disagreed with me, no matter how illogical or inhumane I considered their views, but over the past year it’s gotten a lot harder to do that. …
Apologies for not blogging for such a long period of time. As I’ve mentioned before, I finished the rough draft of my first novel this past May, and after “letting it rest” for three months — basically letting myself forget about it completely so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and really see what did and didn’t work in it (the story is great but my language is too bare) — I began editing the rough draft a couple of weeks ago. …