Back . . . with a VENGEANCE

It has been some time since I have blogged about anything. It had much to do with summer and watching my children, who are time consuming in the most wonderful ways.

I wrote and had accepted my first book review this summer. It was a deeply profound task as I had never undertaken the evaluation of another's hard work before. I found it rewarding in most respects and would gladly undertake another review project.

The Student Literary Magazine Conference choose DACC as its next destination, so I have been planning for the conference in 2011. I have also been working tirelessly on putting together "The Best Road Tour," which, so far, will feature eight reading dates. I'm pleased with the tour so far, and plan on adding one or two more dates and calling it good for this year.

The writing has been thin, I must admit, and poor over the summer. I am feeling a little sunken, but I have been reading some excellent work. At the beginning of the summer, I finally had a chance to complete my reading of the anthology Home of the Brave, edited by Jeffery Hess and published by Press 53 (www.press53.com). It is a wonderful collection of "war" stories. I put war in quotes because the stories are not exclusively about men or women in war. These stories live on the edge of war as well, something many of us do these days. We look from the outside in at the horrors, and we think, "My God, how can anyone survive that?" Yet they do, and in many of the stories in Home of the Brave we get a clear insight into how survival comes about and, in some cases, the costs of that survival.

I also read Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff and truly enjoyed its honesty and bravery in the face of small-town hell and heaven. I also admire the brutality. For a writer, often times, brutal reality can be difficult to grasp because it is so harsh on the mind and the soul. It is hard to write about burning children, as David Foster Wallace does in "Incarnations of Burned Children." But, like Wallace and like Dorothy Allison, Pollock stares his Knockemstiff, OH right in the face, doesn't flinch, and presents it as it is. We, the readers, come out on the other side haunted by a clearer picture of American small-town life. The voice rings in Knockemstiff with a truth to it, a small bite of American life in rural Ohio that slips between the character's voices and imbeds itself somewhere in the recesses of our brains. I'm still thinking about Knockemstiff. I'm still the tourist with the photographer-wife. "So, this is Knockemstiff." "So, this is Licking." "So, this is Toad Suck." Or Gnaw Bone. Wherever the road may take you, you should know, as a reader and a writer, that it is a winding road with turns so sharp they'll cut you. As they do in Knockemstiff, OH.