Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. – Alan W. Watts It’s widely understood that a writer who leaves home and lives far away gains an edge when it comes to writing well about the world left behind. We assume geography is the only explanation for this added edge, but …
A life without Sally?!
I have been asking myself this for the last day and a half: Can life be without our Sally? She came to us and soon we could not imagine loving any other dog than her. She seemed to have these human qualities, being so sensitive and intuitive and with such strong feelings. Sally ran away. She was scared – of …
Steve’s Weekly Blog: On Knowing What to Leave Out
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. – Friedrich Nietzsche A beginning writer new to the art of rewriting, or call it the craft of condensing, starts by pruning adverbs and prepositional phrases and graduates to vaporizing whole paragraphs or pages at a time. …
Chickens alive!
What a scare we got last night! Josh checked on the three remaining chickens that we have – the majority of our chickens and our rooster Jerry fell victim to coyotes a few weeks earlier. Since then, locking up our chickens at night and reinforcing their Fort Knox has been a priority. But when Josh went down in the pouring …
Steve’s Weekly Blog: If Satire Feeds on Anger, Why Is It Almost Dead?
We have no ideas, and they’re pretty firm. – Joseph Heller The decline in satiric novels as a robust, recognized category of U.S. fiction tends to be taken as a foregone conclusion, lamented but passively accepted, even as the need for satire turns acute. I say: Let’s not give up so easily. Satire and its cousin the lampoon (directed …