Lent 2025: March 24

A dear friend died in the last few days. He was 63 or 64. An outstanding person. My brother-in-law passed away last Monday. Death and disease sometimes feels like it surrounds us.

Lent reminds me not to be sugary and optimistic about things. Pain and suffering are real. They may be temporary, but they are no less real.

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Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek. But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same). Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...

Books I Have Read Lately

Retirement means more time to read. One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...

Poem of the Day

Vision Driving on a busy highway designed to relieve traffic on a busier one, My glimpse lands on a mound of color in the turning lane ahead. I see a human body. That is not what it is, but what my mind perceives. The envisioned body is wearing a bathing suit, and it is female. It is deceased of course; half of it is legs with pale skin, half is a mix of red and blue and yellow. My heart tightens; my eyes, which need to look elsewhere, are captured. I go under a traffic light and the pile transforms into a towel twisted into some elongated shape, either thrown and dropped from a vehicle. Why did I see a corpse in the way of oncoming cars? Are my eyes failing me? My corrective lenses? My imagination? My expectations? Is it too much true crime television? Who knows? And what if I had seen a human form that metamorphosed into a towel? --- This is more about a concern of aging, not to show my poetic skill. I write one or two (or fewer) poems a year. ...

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