Tag: #books

  • Short Story Review: “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff

    (The short story “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff appeared in the November 10th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat

    “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff is a good story, except for one thing. And I’ll get to that.

    But before I get to that, this story made me think about the world my mother lived in. She was married with three sons, and though she told us she loved it, she did have to deal with three stinky boys, who became men, and all the baggage that came with it. Later in life, when me and my brothers got married and had our own families, did it start to dawn on us how much of her life was confined with masculine demands. In that context, much of what is expressed in this story by the narrator rang true to me; that men are always in her house, how her boys were now men, and the need for her home to be a safe place.

    When the stalker is added to the story, and thus kicking off the plot, the menace that this man places on the narrator, is not only an immediate threat to her, but also to her home, and these men in her life. And this stalker is truly a threat, because he does have a gun. This weapon also functions as a reminder that violence and men are never too far apart from each other. Her husband has a baseball bat, her sons offer their own cocky protection to their mother, and the narrator even tries to enlist the workers from her home renovation for additional security. All of this raised interesting questions of violence and safety, of masculine and feminine roles, how a mother goes from protector of her sons, to needing protection from them. Even the title of story, which is also the title Catholics use in reference to Mary mother of Jesus, wasn’t lost on me, and added another layer to the piece. Great stuff.

    And then the climax happened. The stalker enters the home at night, the narrator is unable to take action, so her son asks the stalker to leave, which the stalker does. And it felt completely incongruent to everything that had come before in the story. This climax broke Chekhov’s Gun Rule, which means if you introduce a gun in the story, you have to fire it at the end. There was an expectation of violence, threat, even menace in this story, and to not deliver a resolution to that expectation left the ending of the story feeling hollow. And I did spend time thinking about this climax and the choices that were made, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion – the gun needed to be fired.

  • Prose Poetry Review: “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt

    (The prose poetry piece “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt appeared at Rejection Letters on October 16, 2025.)

    Image by Aaron Burch

    It’s been awhile since a work popped me on the nose, making me wake up and pay attention. “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt isn’t an angry or an aggressive poem, but it does confront the numb sedimentary routine that can creep in, and dominate one’s life.

    I was taken with the start of the piece; how the first line acted like an explosion, and then what followed were words that created contraction, as if the speaker was falling back into themselves, regressing. Look at that first line of the piece, “My friend says let’s go to the shooting range…” a statement to take action, but then the speaker pulls back, “and I tell her I don’t know anything about guns. About hunting. About how fun it is to let loose.” What follows are three examples of empty, disparate attempts at human connection; dinner with a phone, responding to a text on the toilet, not answering a call from their mother though the speaker watches the screen light up. It’s a good use of the “Rule of Three” and excellent at setting the theme and mood. When the choice is made to take action, to connect both physically and emotionally, an almost resignation takes over. The phone reenters the scene. Though the speaker makes a shallow attempt of connection with their friend via the phone, I can’t blame the friend for not watching the sent meme.

    This isn’t the first piece to decry the vapidness of smart phones, how they are destroying people’s ability to connect with others, or how technology can be alienating. What “Guns, Sex, Phones” touches on with a sharp melancholy focus is how lonely and emotionally trapped this world is becoming. There is no substitute for connection, actual human connection. That these connections need to be cultivated. And if we’re not careful with where we put our attention, we may lose the ability to grow further.

  • Focus!

    The kid started in middle school this year, and I wrote awhile back about how she is adjusting to having more homework. And it’s going okay. We are still working and adjusting to the change.

    One of the issues the kid has with doing her homework, is that she gets bored and her mind wanders. A totally normal reaction for a kid to have when it comes to reading about world history, or having to write a paragraph on the three different states of matter. What we are trying is the twenty minutes of work, and five minutes of break time. Back and forth until the home work is done. Seems to be working.

    The funny thing that I discovered about myself is that I can’t sit down and work anymore. Good lord do I get distracted easily. Like really easily. See, I have been trying to work on this blog for thirty minutes now, but I keep on thinking of something else I need to do – which I have to go and do so I don’t forget.

    Sure, I know that there are some of you out there that would call that procrastinating, and you might be right.

    But what I feel myself experiencing is a lack of focus. Like, I sit down and I write a sentence, and then I start to wonder about… well, anything and everything. I kind’a find myself going to Wikipedia and just reading page after page about weird stuff. Or seeing if L.L Bean is selling any sweaters at a discount.

    I feel that I have lost the skill of being able to sit down and focus for even twenty minutes.

    I could blame my phone, and that would be accurate. Yet, don’t I have to take a little responsibility here? If I have a lack of focus, then I am the one who created this problem, right?

  • Getting Back to It, Again

    So, I’ve been doing this stay-at-home-dad thing for the past five years, and I keep thinking that when school starts back up for the kid, I will instantly fall right back into my reading/writing routine. I can excuse the first year, because it was the first year and I didn’t know any better. But the past four… Yeah, I know better, but I still won’t believe it.

    The issue that I have is a very basic human issue; I get knocked out of my pattern, and it is difficult to restart the healthy habits that I had.

    See, From January to June, we have a solid work/school schedule for everyone in the house. It’s a routine that we all can get behind and live within. And then Summer Vacation comes, and it blows everything up, and we’re all floundering, and waking up at different times every day. It’s just a wonder chaos, but its chaos compared for the first half of the year. I don’t accomplish a whole lot over Summer, but it is summer, and with a kid around, things do get lazy.

    Then the school year starts up, with the new routine, and schedule. There are clearly some kinks in the system as we get rolling, but the schedule works itself out, and we all fall into place, right?

    No, because the old habit got broken, and we have to reestablish a new habit. And that takes time. As it does every year. Every year it is the same thing; gotta work at getting back into the groove.

    But I keep thinking that “this year will be different.” That this year I will fall right back into doing all the stuff I want and need to do. There’s this huge stack of books I need to read, and I think that I will get right to it… but the reality is that at first I have to work at it – force myself to sit down and start reading. And then there all these emails of stories and flash pieces that I need to respond to… but again, I have to force myself to just set aside fifteen minutes to just get started. And don’t get started on the other creative writing projects that I have – some of which are stuck in the nightmare land of “Unfinished Outline.”

    I do know how this ends. It ends with the new habit being established. The work is completed. That feeling of accomplishment returns. It just takes a little effort every day. And sometimes I have to write a pep talk blog post to get me back to work.

  • Short Story Review: “The Queen of Bad Influences” by Jim Shepard

    (The short story “The Queen of Bad Influences” by Jim Shepard appeared in the June 16th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Naï Zakharia

    Reviewing stuff is fun. Clearly, because I do it often. Who doesn’t like sharing their opinion and acting like an expert? It’s all fun and games until you hit a critical theory paradox; Is it possible to acknowledge that a story is good, and well written, but at the same time does not resonate or move me? That was the situation I ran into when I finished reading “The Queen of Bad Influences” by Jim Shepard.

    To be clear, “The Queen of Bad Influences” is a good story, well written, and I have no qualms in recommending that you should read this story because it has a very relevant theme, is constructed well, is insightful, has a bit of action and tragedy to it, the protagonist is engaging and grows over the story, and the use of language is spot on. All the boxes are checked here.

    Yet, I just didn’t feel anything.

    Look, I write these reviews for my own enjoyment, and as an exercise in analyzing what makes a short story work, or not work, so I might improve my ability as a writer. On the whole, I will only review a work if it moves me, garners an emotional reaction, either positive or negative. If I don’t have a reaction, then I let it go and move on. (Now, if someone wants to pay me, I’ll review whatever you send me.) These aren’t deep philosophical rules that I follow, but more like functional guidelines.

    When I finished “The Queen of Bad Influences,” I didn’t have a reaction to it. At first I was going to write something negative about the piece, but the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t seem accurate to do it. I went back through the story, and I really couldn’t find a fault with it, save one line, but that wasn’t that big of a deal. What I came to accept is that this isn’t the story or the writer’s fault, it’s me. This is just not my thing.

    Let me try putting it a different way, which my Gen-X grunge mind can appreciate; “The Queen of Bad Influences” is like Alice in Chains. I get why people love the hell out of Alice in Chains. Alice in Chains was made up of some really great musicians, who wrote some really great songs. I’m not an Alice in Chains fan because they suck – I’m not a fan because they don’t resonate with me the way Nirvana, or Pixies, or a host of other grunge bands do. It’s me, not them.

    It’s me, and not Jim Shepard and “The Queen of Bad Influences.”

    Anyway, go read this story. You’ll enjoy it.