Creative Commentary
Poe the Athlete – Part 4
I’m head track coach at a major university and have trained some of the finest young athletes in the world. I don’t recruit anyone lacking potential to place high and score points in important meets. That I explained to members of a literary society when they presented physical data about Edgar Allan Poe. He was…
Read MoreFoster Father of Poe – Part 3
Convinced of my correctness I sailed from Scotland to America at age sixteen and immediately began as a clerk in the Richmond tobacco company of my Uncle William Galt. The old bachelor was the wealthiest man in Virginia but kept me tight to business and doted on his four adopted children and four more he…
Read MoreKeeping Hemingway Alive
Never had I craved anything so much as this strange and alluring task. Thousands of other doctors clamored for the opportunity but most lacked the necessary vigor. Only a man obsessed would be fit to lead this scientific revolution, and I was thus chosen to sacrifice all in the quest to keep Ernest Hemingway alive…
Read MoreTabulating Tiger Woods
More than a decade of launching missiles from the tee, targeting the green with long irons, battering the pin with approach shots, chipping close from the rough, nailing putts long and short on greens flat and undulating around the globe, pumping his fist, intimidating opponents, and forging preposterous victories – by 15 strokes in a…
Read MoreEliza Poe – Part 2
In more than thirty years representing actresses I had never received such an astonishing application. At first, naturally, I considered it a hoax. Eliza Poe, claiming to have been born more than two centuries ago in England, wrote that she most urgently needed to meet me. Ordinarily it is difficult approaching impossible to get through…
Read MoreLife of a Pig
I’m twelve years old and have never known another pig since I don’t remember suckling my mother but with enduring clarity I recall my first home, in the back yard of a family in the San Fernando Valley. I was a twenty-pound piglet then and enjoyed the kids and their friends patting me while cooing…
Read MoreSkipper Stu Nahan
Wednesday night, after I’d scurried around the airport in Fresno, looking for luggage that wasn’t there, my cell phone vibrated but I ignored it and instead stepped to customer service and politely scolded the airline representative for shoehorning me into a connecting flight that, especially during holiday season, was unlikely to receive bags from my…
Read MoreCrisis in the Sink
Harold wasn’t going to let them blame this crisis on shoddy housekeeping. Granted, the aged food covered with starving ants on the floor between refrigerator and cabinet must have been his responsibility since he didn’t see anyone else throw it there and couldn’t plausibly explain who might’ve committed such an act. That, at any rate,…
Read MoreTwo Letters to Norman Mailer
In 1988 I was struggling with alcohol and substance abuse. I doubt I would write two letters like these now, as I near my tenth anniversary of sobriety, but from a literary standpoint it’s certain I should exhume some of the anger that follows and put it on paper. May 10, 1988 Dear Norman, I’ve…
Read MoreNorman Mailer Embraces “The White Negro”
Of thousands of piquant opinions I fired into the literary firmament one of the last was that the Internet is the most wretched invention since masturbation. Nevertheless, in my new world of decidedly more restricted options, I was thankful to be given a few hours online to read tributes and broadsides that followed my earthly…
Read MoreRight Church
I didn’t know where to look. From first grade I’d gone to Catholic church. It was routine and boring with kneeling and standing while priests mumbled and hissed things not related to daily life. At monthly confession I felt they were snobby and unapproachable, especially when told had two sons and wasn’t married. They grilled…
Read MoreAhmadinejad and Bush Spar at the United Nations
In a startling (and heretofore unreported) miscalculation in security planning last week at the United Nations in New York, secret service agents led a rapidly-departing President George W. Bush right into the exit path of the man he most loves to talk about but least wants to talk to, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. President…
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