Category: Miscellaneous

My friend, Michael C. Keith, appeared last week on Doug Holder’s Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer series on Somerville Community Access TV.  The YouTube interview can be viewed at <https://somerville.vod.castus.tv/vod/?video=335e1fa6-690b-4b41-a051-06dba351f965&nav=recent>.

Luke is having his book launch party for “No Common War” at Porter Square Books on Wednesday, June 5, 2019.

April 10: I enjoyed the professional reading/ agent reviews of randomly selected manuscripts at tonight’s Mystery Writers of America New England Chapter at the Brookline Public Library.

After I read my original children’s story, “Ashanti’s Ham Radio Saves the Day” to the 3rd grade class at St. Columbkille last month, several of the kids wanted to do the illustration for a front cover. Here is one of the more talented drawings:

A Win for the Oxford Comma: This Lawsuit Shows Why It’s So Important

I’m attending the Muse and the Marketplace writing conference at the Park Plaza in Boston at the beginning of April. The Muse is billed as “the number one writing conference in North America” with over 140 well-known authors and “more than 800 people on some 100 panels.” 

I wanted to put in a plug for GrubStreet.  From their website:

“GrubStreet is one of the nation’s leading creative writing centers. We believe that narrative transforms lives, builds bridges, and produces empathy. By rigorously developing voices of every type and talent and by removing barriers to entry, GrubStreet fosters the creation of meaningful stories and ensures that excellent writing remains vital and relevant.”

I’ve attended a few of their free workshops in the past. I finally decided this week to become a member.

From The Atlantic:

This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.

One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.

I wanted to put in a plug for my friend Michael C. Keith’s latest book, “Let Us Now Speak of Extinction” from Mad Hat Press.  

Keith’s opus possesses shades of Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, and aNew Yorker cartoon for extraterrestrials. Let Us Now Speak of Extinction is eerily addicting. ––Jo Maeder

Michael C. Keith’s short pieces seem relatively benign at first, but wait a moment and you feel the snap of his literary whip. Keith subverts things with a smile––like putting a dagger in the back of the iconic Jack Kerouac by posing whether his girlfriend was a better writer than this Beat patriarch. He brings an amused eye to our inevitable demise, our strutting and posturing before the black void. Keith is a writer who can shake your hand or use a well-appointed whoopee cushion to blow the hot air out from where the sun don’t shine. He keeps you honest. He keeps you thinking. He keeps you reading. –– Doug Holder

Buy it. It’s money well-spent.

I wanted to put in a plug for Duotrope. It’s a fabulous resource for writers. I’ve been a subscriber now going on six years.

Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers and artists that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submissions tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points we’ve gathered on the publishers and agents we list.”

From: https://writetodone.com/3-habits-separate-good-writers-tragic-wannabes/

…The only true measure of whether a piece of writing is any good is the impact it has on its intended audience.

Did it engage them? Did it move them? Did it change them?

I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s readings by Heather Madden, GennaRose Nethercott, and Julia Story at the Červená Barva Press Reading Series in Somerville, Massachusetts. Gloria Mindock has tentatively invited me to read from my new story collection “Machine Feelings” in the near future.

[Show slideshow]

I was asked to write a blurb for a fellow Big Table Publishing author, Thomas R. Bransten. It was a delightful book!

“Thomas R. Bransten has conjured up a wickedly delightful ‘Who dunnit?’ murder-mystery set in the fictional African country of Zembeylia. There are  a multitude of suspects who also just happen to be professional travel agents visiting on a tour. Oh–and a government coup thrown in for good measure. Weaving a rich tapestry of eccentric characters, exotic locale, and downright slaphappy action, The Journey to Zembeylia is one you’ll not want to put down.”

-Phillip E. Temples, “Machine Feelings and Other Stories”

Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah, Manager of Instructional Services at the O’Neill Library at Boston College, periodically holds a drive to collect books to send to libraries in Africa. He’s a wonderful and caring human being.

The Computer Science Department capitalized on our move this week; its faculty donated many dozens of computer books that were no longer needed. I’m standing next to a pile in our nearly vacated offices in Maloney Hall.

If anyone else out there in FB-land has old books that they hate throw away, please consider this worthy cause. If you’re in the Boston area, I’d be happy to act as a go-between. Or if you live further away and could afford the shipping charges to Boston, I’m sure that Kwasi would love to receive even more books. The books don’t have to be textbooks, incidentally. Kwasi and his colleagues collect and ship all sorts of books to Africa.