Kafka’s last known photograph. I have cup that has a quote on it by Franz Kafka. I bought the cup at the Kafka museum in Prague, a pinkish, stucco affair near the Vltava River where Kafka grew up. The museum, like the author himself, is dark inside, with byzantine corridors and dimly lit rooms filled with his pictures and letters…
Why People Put up Roadside Memorials A few weeks ago as I was driving I saw a wooden cross along a roadside and it reminded me of the recent death of a friend. It also made me think of the research I did for my novel Resting Places (why-people-put-up-roadside-memorials). I went cross country with a friend stopping at hundreds of roadside…
Who are your literary influences or inspiration? Through my undergrad and Ph.D. programs I was influenced, sometime unduly so, by the great American writers in the canon: Melville, Crane, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I especially found myself in the thrall of the two opposing masters, Hemingway (made a pilgrimage to his grave in Ketcham, Idaho) and Faulkner. I wrote short cryptic…
Baron Wormser was my friend, colleague, mentor and mentee for over 25 years. We shared much together, enjoyed Maker’s Mark together, exchanged our work, loved to talk late into the night, argued our Red Sox/Yankees rivalry. His death has surprised and saddened us all but it has made us think about the man and his work. This is in memory…
Mother to Son. Racism is at the heart of my latest novel, Skunktown. Set during the turbulent year 1968, my main character and narrator is 12-year-old Lyman. Lyman, who is white, must unlearn many of the racist attitudes he has been taught growing up, before he can begin to think and feel and see things through a less biased perspective.…
The River is Waiting, Wally Lamb Of all the many things I loved about this powerful novel, the one that most grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go was the central character, Corby (warning: spoiler-alert). Sent to prison for the unimaginable crime of accidentally killing his own son while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, Corby…
Recently, I went fly-fishing with a dear friend. We’ve known each other for ages, and both of us are old enough to know that we can no longer deny the fact that we are old men. Even though we didn’t catch anything, we assuaged our wounded egos by telling ourselves that we could still negotiate the river in waders without…
With the killing of Charlie Kirk, followed immediately by blaming of the “radical left,” then by the canonization of the man himself by the right, I was reminded of something that happened in Germany in the pre-Nazi era, something we ought to take note of. On February 23, 1930, a little-known member of the Nazi Stormtroopers named Horst Wessel was…
Five Research Tips For Writing Historical Fiction In his essay, “Two Cheers for Presentism,” the historian David Bell writes, “The past, it has often been said, is a foreign country: weird, wonderful, and strange. Great historians give a visceral sense of this foreignness, showing that what looks familiar at first sight is really anything but, and revealing, with an…
Klan rally in Connecticut, 1980. My first college teaching job was in 1981 in the mountains of western North Carolina. Moving there from the big city of Denver, I was shocked by some of the blatant forms of racism that still existed. I’d have thought that with the Civil Rights movement, social protests, and riots of the sixties, such examples…