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 …
by Alec Clayton It takes me a year or two to write a novel, which means I spend that much time getting to know each of the characters in my novels. And then I forget about them. I go on to my next novel and a new set of characters, and tend to forget the …
Satire—as if you need to be told by Alec Clayton The new film Cavorting Naked in the Dark, neither produced nor directed by legendary filmmaker John Longenbaugh, is perhaps scheduled to premiere at Olympia’s equally legendary Capitol Theater on Feb. 31. Longenbaugh, who worked on neither Titanic nor Birth of a Nation and is married …
Sometime around 1970 I was offered the job as the art teacher for the Clarkton, Mo., public school. Notice there’s no s on the end of school. There was one school for grades kindergarten through 12. I mostly taught high school with a few hours each week in the lower grades. Clarkton is in the …