Category: Writing

  • Summer Break is Over

    Before I had a kid, and was a young adult running around New York City, the framework dates for Summer were simple; It lasted from Memorial Day to Labor Day. After Memorial Day, it felt like the City emptied out, and then the day after Labor Day, the City filled back up. And that was how I thought of Summer in those days.

    After having a kid, “Summer” returned to the definition it had when I was a child; Summer was from when school ended, to when school started up again. It didn’t fit neatly into the Memorial/Labor Day bookends, because the school bookends feel correct.

    Which brings me to say that Summer is over as the kid is back in school.

    And this was an okay Summer. Nothing amazing, but still fun. We did some road trips as a family, visiting Vermont and West Virginia. The kid went to her sleep away camp, which allowed all of us to enjoy a break from each other, and as enjoy reuniting as a family again.

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    (Here I am about to go four-wheelin’ in Vermont.)

    Creatively, I took a break this Summer. I kept up the journal, but decided that I should have a break from the blog, reviews, and fiction. I thought it best to catch up on reading, and start thinking about what I want to accomplish for the last half of the year. I did work a little on a novel, but it was more an exercise of fun, and not meant to be anything more than that.

    So, here I sit, writing a blog on the couch, a stack of books on the end table, and a crap ton of short stories clogging up my Inbox that need to be read and possibly reviewed. Then there are the stories I need to finish writing, and then proceed to submit to all the lit journals across the internets.

    Which leads me to say, I am looking forward to Autumn!

  • Flash Fiction Review – “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney

    (The flash fiction story “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney was published on March 19th, 2026 at Milk Candy Review.)

    “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney is the type of flash piece that makes me love flash writers as they can be inventive and playful with this form, while at the same time making me ask, in a mischievous way, “What did I just read?”

    In “Two days after I dies” Justine Sweeny gives to us the character of a recently realized ghost. I love that this spirit is frantic and unhinged – tethered to this world, either unable or unwilling to leave it. Sweeny uses effectively simple techniques here; lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, and short words that make a choppy, staccato rhythm to the piece. What the writer creates is a spirit’s frenzied attempt to get all of these words out and tell us this self-perceived vitally important story. There is an anger to this ghost. A viciousness in her as she is annoyed that someone she doesn’t know well would dare post a personal reflection of her passing on social media. There is a hint at humor in the beginning, but as the fury builds, the tone begins to switch to an unhealthy bitterness which is out of proportion to the allegedly aggrieved crime. Take how the ghost lists all the offenses of this woman. Though the ghost sees the offenses as unforgivable transgressions, we start to feel a sense of jealousness in the comparison of their motherly actions. And when the twist arrives at the end, it lands with pity, and a disbelief that one, even in the afterlife, is so wrapped and warped in grievance, lacking the empathy to acknowledge that there is one person they cared about suffering in their mourning. But most haunting is how this ghost seems to lack even the slightest hint of remorse or regret that she is no longer with her children.

    Sweeney’s “Two days after I died” is a very short and compacted work, but it left me with wonderful questions to roll over in my head. Was the woman who posted on social media really affected to the degree that she claimed, or was it as the ghost suspected, a bit of online grief porn? Can one’s anger and bitterness make a person completely blind to their loved ones suffering? Can animosity and hostility follow us into the next world? Clearly, the theme was meant to apply to us in the here and now, but “Two days after I died” is a succinct rumination of the metaphysical possibility that a life lived unwell, will leave you emotionally untethered in spitefulness.

  • It’s Summer Vacation, and I’m Bored… (Unedited)

    We are on day two of the kid’s summer vacation, and this morning I was told by my daughter that there is nothing to do, and she’s bored.

    Ah, yes. The dreaded but completely expected statement which I knew was only a matter of time before it was uttered.

    I know that this is a sticky debate for some parents. There is one camp which is “Let the kids be bored” as that will teach them to make their own fun. The downside to this stance is that most kids, mine included, will go running to a screen… so not so much a win there.

    The other camp is to schedule the kid to do stuff, and keep the boredom away. The two downsides on this one is that parent is solving the problem and not the kid. The second point is that activities can be expensive.

    I’m trying to find a balance in the middle. I want the kid to solve her own boredom issue without running to a screen, which means that we have to set screen limits. The other side is that this might be one of my last summers to do stuff with the kid around the City, and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to spend time with her.

    There is one other thing. If I’m spending my time with the kid, that means I don’t get a chance to work on my writing. (I only have four minutes left before I have to go off and make everyone lunch.) I’m trying to figure out a way that we can sit in front of the TV and watch the World Cup together, and I can work on some things, but that is an awful plan as I get wrapped up in talking to the kid, or watching the match.

    I also have to remind myself that the way I grew up, is nothing like the way my kid is growing up. I grew up in a suburb outside of Dallas that was full of families and kids, so every summer, I could run out of the house, and find another kid to go and do something with, and never leave the block. My daughter’s friends are spread out all over the City, and each kid goes to a different type of school, so not everyone’s vacations line up. She really can’t run out the door and play.

    Anyway… Today, we are going to kick the soccer ball in the park and draw on the couch as we watch the World Cup. That should do the trick for today.

  • Short Story Review: “Stories” by Annie Ernaux

    (The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker

    You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.

    See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)

    I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.

  • Ode to My Dog Who Sleeps All Day

    Oh, my little dog.

    You do nothing all day.

    To move from your bed, to my bed, to under my bed, to the couch, then under the dinning room table, ending on the middle of the floor; you are so tired.

    When I am at my desk, you lay under it. I look down at you, and though you act like you are sleeping, I see your side eye.

    What do you wonder? What do you dream?

    You do not understand time, but you understand pattern.

    Where is the lady? Where is the kid? Why are you still here? I think I will sleep. No! I will lick my left front paw. THEN, I will sleep. Hey you’re moving… I will follow you to the couch… where I will sleep next to you.