Thirty years ago, in the spring of 1985, I had the great fortune to find myself in Paul West’s English 412 class: Advanced Fiction Writing. I think it was likely one of the last times he taught undergraduate fiction at Penn State. Sadly, Paul experienced health problems that knocked him out of commission for the…
This post comes from Maximum Fiction's Department of Shameless Self Promotion. One of my sidebar passions is guitar, and I recently had the great fortune of working with Dinosaur Magazine Intl on an article about the groovy vintage designs produced by Eastwood Guitars. The full article appears in the new print edition of Dinosaur, but…
A very modest proposal... Whereas every right we treasure in the United States comes with responsibilities we must uphold; and, whereas the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States clearly reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear…
At long last I’m returning to the blog after a summer (and then some) of, well, screwing around. In this post, I expand on some remarks I made in answer to a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “M.F.A. Fever.” The column takes up the challenges of advising students who seem to have…
OK, three years of updating this post and I'm still tired of the same old X-mas rut. Perhaps even more so this year as advertisers broke the Halloween Barrier and started with the forced cheer and jingly bells mid-October. As Louis Black put it, "How long does it take you people to shop?" This year's…
