adolescence | adolescence
Feb.07.2013
I became a writer in the middle of the night. Waking suddenly at two am, nothing particularly stirring in my brain or mounting on the list of things to do, I found myself in aware of the little bit of light in the darkness. Awake. For no real reason. My brother had bought me a transistor radio...
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Jan.30.2013
Today we celebrated our sixth “research day” at my college (The College of Management Academic Studies). This day reminds me of the American invention of "show and tell". It taught my daughters, from an early age, how to prepare a topic and present it clearly to an audience.
We...
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Dec.21.2012
Two Posies
Our nurse caps askew. Bobby pins trailing. Fake clouds, pulled from the insides of pillows, strewn between the replanted pines. The lawn glowing behind everything as we ran.
We left a piece of you behind on that hospital bed. The wrong kind of humour leaking from your...
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Dec.10.2012
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson is a fine novel that mixes old age with bildungsroman. The protagonist, Trond, speaks in two time zones: in one chapter he offers an account of the austere life he is building for himself in the Norwegian countryside as an old man; in the next chapter he...
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Nov.10.2012
She's twelve-and-a-half.
I know, that whole "and-a-half" thing usually gets jettisoned before a kid's tenth birthday, but in her case, twelve and-a-half is closer to fifteen than it is twelve, know what I mean?
I don't consider my daughter a "tween" anymore; she's a bona fide, one hundred percent,...
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Jun.20.2011
Below is the concluding paragraphs of my book, The Lonely Place. I have decided to begin talking to people about that book again--our young people deserve to be strong in the world. The novel it talks about, One Drum, will be out soon--another long project of the heart coming to completion. ...
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Jun.17.2011
Behind the street lights, the sky is milky gray, featureless, an extension of the sidewalk under my heels. The air is damp and chill. My brother’s condo is three blocks away. Ten minutes ago, I turned down any number of offers for a ride there: tonight I need to process what has come before, and...
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Jun.07.2011
The first twelve stories in Life in the Cathode Ray Glow: Stories about Growing Up in the ’60s and ’70s and Other Fiction by Ray Sikes, though containing elements of the author’s own childhood and teenage perceptions and experiences, are, nevertheless, fictional. With an inherent distrust of...
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Mar.31.2011
Friendship is a whimsical thing. Its inception is often the result of pure coincidence, a chance meeting of two people that because of circumstance blossoms into a bond. If nurtured and cherished, this connection has the potential to expose the deepest regions of an individual's heart and soul....
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Feb.22.2011
Rocky, Bullwinkle, Dostoevsky and MeI just saw a hilarious post by Jimmy Chen called "Raskolnikov's Inbox" which I have pasted at the end of this blog post, below. And it got me to thinking. I don't know when you first sampled the novels of Dostoevsky, but references to his masterwork, ...
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