Category: Literary Essay
At the outset of what I would describe as my reading life, which began in earnest at the age of nine, I discovered Louis L’Amour. He wasn’t the first writer I would very nearly wholly consume, but he remains what I might describe as my first true guide. As I consider it, some of my […]
My favorite album by the mode is Black Celebration. I bought the cassette just short of my twelfth birthday in May, 1986. Over the ensuing years I’d burn through two additional cassette copies of Black Celebration before purchasing it four times more in both CD and on Vinyl. Yeah, I could have just made a […]
Taped to the bottom of the monitor at my writing desk are the words: Novelist plumbed the soul’s depths. These words, now yellowed, are taken from a newspaper clipping of a Los Angeles Times obituary I carefully cut from the paper on the morning of November 2nd, 2006. William Styron was dead. Now that he […]
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A Fortunate Shore
At the time of his death, Camus had been at work on a novel which mortality forbad him to complete. What he managed to put on the page was published, as he left it, thirty-five years after his end. The novel is entitled The First Man. It tells the story of a young boy named […]
I believe God made me for a purpose; He also made me a wordsmith and then promptly left the sentence of my life unwritten, bidding I set out and write it. I have no tangible memory of God. And why should I? There are a few ideas from earlier programming still tossing about in the […]
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Nuance
Recently, I revisited a particular scene in Mel Stuart’s 1971 musical fantasy, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Of a heavy evening, the poor paper boy Charlie Bucket arrives at the laundry where his mother, Mrs. Bucket is working late. He offers to walk her home, but the impromptu visit is really intended to lessen […]
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Soul Coaxing
First, a few brief points of consideration, some of which are vivid memory and others possibly re-imagined but no less authentic; none in any particular order: –Dad sings along in natural French to Michel Polnareff. One voice blends in harmony with the scratchy vinyl recording of the other. The creamy sound of the language is […]
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English Major
I transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah after two years abroad. Halfway through my sophomore year I was failing college and dead broke. I was as low as I had ever been. The varnish with its lustrous shine was off the Y. I was taking a cold discerning look at the school and […]