by Alec Clayton My dad died 35 years ago, and my mother died 38 years ago. This week I received in the mail a large box of family memorabilia from Pat Parish Ackland, one of my many nieces. Inside were photographs, more than half of which were of people I don’t recognize, and newspaper clippings, …
One More Day review After reading Diane Chiddister’s debut novel One More Day, it is almost impossible to believe that Chiddister has never worked in or been a resident in an assisted living home or known a loved one who worked in or lived in an assisted living situation. How else, could she know so …
My longtime friend, the painter Thornton Willis, died June 15, 2025 from complications due to COVID and pneumonia. As soon as I heard about his death from his wife, Vered Lieb, I wrote a brief memory of my friendship with Thornton and sent it to her. She immediately wrote back asking if she could get …
Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett, the guy who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for …
What’s in a name One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters—names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. Like Driver and Punkin, the Lumpkin twins’ parents in Tupelo. The inspiration for giving them nicknames (if I remember correctly I never called them …
Thirty years ago, give or take a few years, a couple lived on our street who would not speak to us. If we tried to engage with them in any way, even such a little a thing as to nod and smile in their direction, they would look away or stare right through us and …
… So you read the first book, and then you got to that time period in the next one, would you wonder why there was no mention of the trial? It was too big to be ignored. It would be like a story about Money, Mississippi in 1955 with no mention of Emmett Till. So I had to retell the story but make it different—and believably so. I wrestled with that problem but finally came up with a simple solution. …
I developed a rather severe infection in my left eye including a very small abscess – the eye they took the tear duct out of because of the cancer. Spending 12 hours at Urgent Care at Kaiser Permanente over two visits Friday night through Saturday afternoon included a CT scan which showed among other things …
The last time I updated this was January 6, 2024. I mentioned then that I was having problems with my eyes tearing and itching and not draining properly due to the cancer surgeon having to remove one of my tear ducts, or multiple tear ducts, I’m not sure, and there was some hearing loss due …
I got this t-shirt at a PFLAG conference in Columbus, Ohio twenty-two years ago, Sept. 27, 2002. I didn’t remember the date but I know it because it’s printed on the shirt. Heading to the airport to fly to Columbus for the event, I pulled over to rest a moment. “What’s wrong?” Gabi asked. “It’s …