Twenty Thousand Roads

Death and the Compass "It's like a plate of shrimp," explains a would-be philosopher in Alex Cox's 1984 movie  Repo Man . "You think about a plate of shrimp and somebody says plate or shrimp, or plate of shrimp. " It's an attempt to explain what he calls the "lattice of coincidence" that lies atop the world, available to us only in glimpses as we fleetingly tap into the cosmic unconsciousness. It's a notion that wouldn't be out of place in a Jorge Luis Borges story, so it's fitting that my introduction to Borges came, in a roundabout way, through the movie.  Included in a box set I bought mainly for Repo Man back when buying physical media was still a thing is another movie, Cox's 1996 BBC/Spanish TV production of  Death and the Compass .   Stylized somewhere between Dick Tracey and Blade Runner , it's a mess, but its cultish appeal and its philosophical heart are undeniable, and it ultimately led me to seek out the B...

So we're in the middle of a pandemic. I guess I should be writing about it, but every time I try, it seems disingenuous somehow. Thousands have died, there are places in the world where hospitals are overrun and societies seem on the verge of at least partial collapse, and we're just starting to see the worst of it here in America. Things, are, as they say, not looking good. But here in my immediate circle, everything is, for the moment, okay. I don't mean to diminish the gravity of the situation or imply that everyone's circumstances are the same, but, in many ways, things are better than okay, they're idyllic for us. As I draft this, I'm sitting in the shade watching my seven-year-old son run around in the sprinkler like it's any other spring day. We've spent a lot of time outdoors, walking on the local trail system, doing yard work, lazing in the Eno hammock. We're eating five-star home-cooked meals and having occasional takeout. We're watch...

It's finally real.  I Have Already Been Here Before  is published and available for order here . Obviously, I'm ecstatic to have it out in the world. But there's also something terrifying about the finality of it; these stories represent the bulk of my creative output for the past fifteen years. I've been tinkering with some of them off and on for much of my adult life. At the risk of being dramatic, the things I poured into those stories — both the stuff I was digging out of my psyche to write about and the effort and optimism it takes to work on any creative endeavor — kept me from losing my shit. And now they're gone. Or at least gone away from me to a place where they're free from my ongoing murder of all their little darlings. So what now? What now, when the future of my writing life, that part of me that meets the day every morning before dawn when the house is quiet and my dreams or nightmares are still fading into the fuzz of waking? That's ...

I've always wanted say I had something about to drop. That probably means people don't really say that anymore, but I'm going to say it anyway. I Have Always Been Here Before , a (very) loosely linked collection of short stories, will be available from  Cowboy Jamboree Press  within a week or so. These stories represent the bulk of the writing I've worked on over the past decade, so it's exciting, not to mention oddly terrifying, to have them collected in one place and out in the world. Here's a sneak peak at one of the stories, "The Big Scary Woods," originally published several years back by Moon City Review . It's a dark comedy about a failing marriage besieged by a pack of raccoons. I had a lot of fun recording this two-part audio version of the story. The links: "The Big Scary Woods" part 1 "The Big, Scary Woods" part 2 And here's another, an excerpt of the title story, originally published in Bull...

The details from the news article are sketchy: police were called to the scene, responding at 11:24 PM, finding the victim, a 45 year old man, dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The incident began as disturbance between neighbors and turned violent. One person was briefly detained, but no charges were filed. That last bit is puzzling. I assume it must've been a case of self-defense so obvious the person who pulled the trigger multiple times was only briefly  detained. He (she?) must've been standing their ground, as the law states. I hadn't seen this man who was killed yesterday in almost three decades, and we weren't particularly close friends even then. I'd heard his life had gone sideways in the time since I'd known him when we were kids growing up in the same church, for all the regular reasons. But this isn't about speculation. It's not about blame. It's about a memory. It is 1981. Maybe '82. Somewhen thereabouts. I am perhaps seven year...

Even now, nearly thirty years later, I don't know exactly why we lost the house except that it had something to do with medical bills. Perhaps if my father were a drunk, he'd have gotten loose-tongued enough at some point over the years to spill it. But he's not, and we never talk about that dark time when the four of us lived in a camping trailer loaned to us by someone from church. We were eventually able (somehow) to get the house back, to stay on the sandhill field-and-pasture land on which my father had grown up, on which his dreams of having a herd of his own cows never materialized, so I guess it's a moot point now. Still, there are things from that time that haunt me like dreams of a past life I can't be sure I lived: my eleven-year old sister having a friend's mom drop her off at the house and walking half a mile through the woods in the dark to where we really lived, the logistics of four people living in a camping trailer, the frustration of w...

Aside from the admonition to write what you know, the most common writing advice is to kill all your little darlings. There's a certain poetic violence to the phrase, attributed to William Faulkner, meant to remind writers to be mercenary when it comes to revision. That wonderful little scene that doesn't quite fit in the narrative? Kill it. That image you spent five hours honing until it was just right, the one describing the gravy congealing on the plate? It takes the steam right out of that dinner scene you need to be fraught with tension. Cut it and don't look back. Sometimes the things we love the most are the very things we need to omit in service of the story. But it hurts so bad. Maybe the more it hurts to cut something, the more it needs to be cut. I think that's the case with a pet scene from my work-in-progress novel. Near the beginning of The Year of the Possum (I think that title might actually be a little darling itself, but I'll deal with that late...