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On Muses
Be patient with your muse, I was recently told. Maybe my mentor sensed my feeling of being time crunched and frustrated. Since working on my second creative portfolio I have bumped into too many false starts. And since I am the author of two forthcoming novels, Year of the Wood Horse and The Chimerican, due out 2016 and 2017 respectively, she may have detected my sense of urgency. While I do know patience is a virtue, I feel that I am running out of patience as I have been patient all my life it seems. So I work hard, studying the body of Alice Munro, hoping the nuts and bolts…
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Returning to Sardinia
This October I will return to Sardinia. According to legend, the island was founded by Sardus, a son of Heracles. But who is Grazia Deledda? That is what I’d rather know more about as I read her 1913 novel, Reeds in the Wind. Just beginning her novel, I am struck by its beauty–not that endorphin generating kind when one happens upon random aesthetically pleasing objects–but rather the kind that is a craft sublime, the prose seemingly aligned for our times, the kind Keats reminded us of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Grazia Deledda speaks to us a one hundred and one years later: “Yes, man’s working…
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Open Letter to the Shade of Max Planck (RIP)
You once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.†But what if you are living in a Second Dark Age? I am writing you at a time when world leaders are moving forward with plans for yet another preemptive invasion of the Middle East, which reminds me of when I would go with my mother to the grocery store. Every time we went into the cereal aisle, I got my eyes bear trapped: bright cartons of cereal, their sugary rainbow bread…