I came late to the Stephen King party. His books first hit the national consciousness when I was a teenager and at the time, I decided they were bad. Not because of the subject matter; I’ve been terrifying myself with stories since I first picked up a book. No those early stories were poorly written, in my opinion, fiction man-handled onto a page by someone without subtly or regard for language. Excep...
I nearly forgot I said this is a place to discuss, books, plays and short stories. As long as I’m finally getting around to plays, I’d like to start out with a favorite: A Moon for the Misbegotten. Every person has life-changing experiences. Some of these are obvious turning points like marriage or the death of a parent, some are not. One of mine was a play I saw at age fifteen, a modern drama. At fif...
Kids take a lot of things for granted. It’s part of being a kid, to accept the world and its people as part of how life should be. That’s a terrible thing for kids who live with pain or deprivation but for a lot of us that meant a childhood where we took bicycles, birthday parties, vacations and our family’s love and devotion as part of our just due. We rarely said thank you. For example, I neve...
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” So says John Steinbeck, the twentieth century novelist teachers forced you to read high school and professors mocked in college. Steinbeck who preaches in The Grapes of Wrath and makes you weep in Of Mice and Men, did you know he could be funny? That man, so serious and b...
Every kid who is lucky gets one or two teachers in their childhood who seem to understand them, teachers they respond to. All of my grade-school teachers were nice people and a few actually seems to care about me but my sixth grade teacher gave me the extra guidance I needed at that uncertain age. She had an intuitive understanding of all the “outsider” kids in her room and found activities that made us val...