All Posts

Hello friends. How are you doing? In the Northern Hemisphere, the dog days of summer are almost over. That pesky Sirius star will stop rising with the sun, and it will be just normal hot. Hopefully you are staying cool and having a great, relaxing time, taking a break, going on vacation, having a staycation, or whatever it is you want to be doing. Me? What am I doing? Reading and writing. One of the best times Lea and I ever had on a trip was when we rented a place that look

Hello Friends, summer is in full swing now. I hope you are enjoying whatever you enjoy doing the most during this time of year. I live in a part of the US where over half the people who have homes here bug out for cooler climates, but the heat dome seems to be the world’s convection oven right now. Although, it snowed in Montana a few weeks ago, so…you know, climate change. July 4th was the 250th birthday of the United States. Like all holidays, the holiday season seems to s

Hello Friends. Happy first day of summer. Big summer plans? Hope you are doing something fun. Me? What am I doing this summer? Thanks for asking. I am writing the final installment of The Austen Chronicles. The book is titled Regardless of You and is my take on my favorite Jane Austen book, Persuasion. Persuasion is one of the “other” three Austen books that non-Janeites generally forget about. I understand why people are smitten with Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. I g

Hello Friends, I hope your spring has sprung. I know some of my friends in the mountains had a huge snowstorm last week…in May. Calendars matter, but Mother Nature is undefeated. She doesn’t care what you expect; she does what she does. As I wrap up book 5 of The Austen Chronicles and get close to the final draft of Comics Lit Vol 2 (more on this below), I realize that writing is often just as unexpected as a spring snowstorm. It is one of the big reasons that real writing,

Hello Friends. Happy April. I hope the tax fairy was good to you this year and left you a present under your pillow and not a bill. It is always good to get good news. So I will send you all happy thoughts. While I’m on the subject of good news, I was just asked to teach a graduate class this summer called Writing and Rhetoric of Nonfiction. I am pretty excited about that because, as you may have noticed, my newsletters have evolved into little works of literary analysis. I

Hello Friends, Big News! I got a new story published! You can read all about it way down at the end of the newsletter. I didn't want to bury the lede. Happy Solstice. Did you try to stand an egg on its end? Did it work? I have actually done it twice in my life that I can remember. That would be amazing if I were 8, but I’m in my 50s, so my success rate is low. I try; I fail. Sometimes I totally forget to try because I’m distracted by…something or other. Who knows. Could be an

Hello Friends. I hope you are doing well. This is going to zig before it zags. Buckle up and hold on. When I was seven, going on eight, two deranged people, one in December of 1980 and another in March of 1981, did some deranged things, and somehow The Catcher in the Rye was "blamed" for the actions of those unwell men. I’m not going to use their names here. I don’t want to give them more space in the world. If you know, you know. If you want to look it up. You can. The poin

Hello Friends, How is your January? Cold? Blustery? Feeling rudderless? I hope not. How are your New Year’s Resolutions? Holding firm? I sure hope so. I’m not a big resolution person, but I do like to set and meet goals. As part of my social media interactions, I do a fun book bingo project each quarter. When I first started, it was just random ideas like “book for middle-readers” or “female narrator.” Eventually, Lea and I started making themes (she also does all the amazin

Hello Friends. I hope you are doing well. As the year ends, we all have a tendency to get wistful. I get it. Things end and begin, and we reflect. I totally understand this idea, but keep in mind that calendars are a construct. Not only is it not the end of 2025 on the Hebrew and Chinese calendars, but they have totally different New Year’s days. So, really, maybe instead of being contemplative just at the end of the year, I would like to advocate for doing some deep thinkin

Hello Friends. I was traveling for work last week, and I had the opportunity to go see a colleague’s mixed media art installation. He used pencils, crayons, paint, paper, and scraps of old paper palettes. Alone, any one of the works of art would have been interesting, but hung in a series, they were different. Seeing them the way he wanted us to see them, in that room, in that order, made a difference to me. Something in him had him make this art and hang it that way, in that

Hello Friends, As you may know by now, Universal Truth is out in the universe now. I am so proud of this book, of this series, of the whole thing. I am now officially halfway through the series. Well, I’m halfway through the fifth book in the series, but the world has the first three. It is really like an out-of-body experience every day. With The Austen Chronicles, I’ve done my best to write a love letter to Jane Austen, while creating my own stories. If I didn’t think I wa

Hello Friends. Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it is sort of worth telling again. When I told Lea that I had been...

Hello Friends, In my younger, and more vulnerable years, I was given a book that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Like most...

Hello Friends, The late, great, Floridian poet said, “ The waiting is the hardest part .” For real, Mr. Petty. I feel you, sir. Waiting...

Happy Summer Solstice, friends. Where I live, it has been summer for a while, so the “first day of summer” is just a day on the calendar....

Hello Friends, My day job, as a Dean, consists of finding ways to grow my program while putting out fires in the day-to-day running of...

Hello friends, Can you believe it's April? It seems like it should be October by now, doesn’t it? I think part of my problem with the...

Hello friends. While I write this, spring has not yet sprung, we are still a few days away from making it official, but it is March and...

Greetings from Snowy Michigan. I’ve capitalized the S in snowy as I firmly believe Snowy Michigan is a real, solid place and thus worthy...

Hello friends. Happy New Year to you. I hope you have found a way to focus on something good. As I said last year, in my January essay, I...