Loren Rhoads's Blog
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Feb.28.2011
Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales by Jake Halpern My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Braving Home sounds like the title of a survivor’s memoir, so I approached this book cautiously. I’ve got nothing against survivors’ memoirs (Morbid Curiosity...
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Feb.27.2011
Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography by Douglas Keister My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I snatched this book off the shelf as soon as my eye landed on it. It has long surprised me that there was no comprehensive dictionary of the symbols found on gravestones. I know the...
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Feb.26.2011
Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Full disclosure: I've cross-dressed once. I passed. I didn't change any of my mannerisms or jewelry. I wore my regular glasses and my regular jeans. People see what they expect to see. Wish I...
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Feb.26.2011
Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists by Tony Perrottet My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Faced with an impending travel moratorium (his girlfriend became pregnant), Tony Perrottet took the family-to-be on the road to explore the route laid out by the original adventure travelers. The...
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Feb.18.2011
I haven't been blogging much here lately, which is good and bad. I've just turned in the first five chapters of The Dangerous Type to my agent. Now I've started revising the rest of the novel, in case she's interested in representing it. It's exciting work, since I think the novel is really fun...
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Feb.05.2011
There are so many things that happened when we were kids that I would love to forget. Instead, I remember the night we drove out into the country roads to sit in the car and drink (Bud for him, cheap wine for me) and talk about our future. I wanted out: out of Flushing, out of Michigan, as...
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Jan.21.2011
Early in October, my daughter came home from a sleepover with a stuffed owl and a homemade wand. She and the other girls had had a Harry Potter-themed treasure hunt. All the while, the hostess wore her Hogwarts robe. She was going to be Hermione at Halloween. Needless to say, my daughter came...
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Jan.15.2011
Yellow Cab picked me up at 5:30, as planned. The fog was so low that the cab's wheels kept spinning out every time a light changed. I worried about doing a marathon with wet shoes and no raincoat -- not even a spare garbage bag to keep me dry. The driver didn't know his way around the park,...
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Jan.07.2011
Strike that. Reverse it.
I'm trying out a site called Workflowy. Silly name. Let's see if it can help me keep things straight.
How do you manage your to-do lists?
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Jan.06.2011
Something made me curious about the number of readings I've given: not the number of readings I've hosted, which is a whole different issue, but the number of times I've gotten up in public to read my own or a friend's work. I used to absolutely dread getting up in front of strangers, my...
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Dec.31.2010
I like to make resolutions each new year. They provide a snapshot of my mindset at the brink of a new year and give me something to laugh about at each year's end. Did I really think I was going to get all my old photos into binders? Was I really intending to clean out the filing cabinet full of...
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Dec.13.2010
I try to sit down at the end of each year to figure out how much writing I've accomplished. The header, which stays the same from year to year, tells you how I feel about it. Here's this year's list of projects:
Wish You Were HereI finished this manuscript of cemetery travel essays in March...
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Dec.10.2010
Weary of cutesy jingles? Family working your last nerve? Ready to go ballistic in the mall? We’ve got a cure… The Literary Death Match presents first annual Holiday Bloodbath Special!
Set to do battle are the “verbal Genghis Kahn” of spoken word, Jamie DeWolf (founder of Tourettes Without...
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Nov.18.2010
The day I moved into my dorm room, a man called just after my mother left me alone for the first time in my life. He threatened to come and rape me. He went into graphic detail of what he was going to do to me. I laughed at him and hung up, but I didn't leave my room until I saw women in the...
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Oct.31.2010
Several years ago, I visited New Orleans for Halloween. While at the Westgate Gallery -- at that time, the world's only gallery devoted to the necromantic arts -- I met a mortician who told me a story that still makes me shiver. I'd love to share it with you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
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Curiosity is the single most important attribute with which humans are born. Curiosity is a powerful tool, like a scalpel or a searchlight. It is a way to affect change -- even to initiate global change -- on a personal level.”
—Loren's introduction to Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues
About Loren
For 10 years, I edited the nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. Scribner published Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues in 2009. Now I'm blogging about graveyards as travel destinations at Cemetery Travel (http://cemeterytravel.com). A collection of my cemetery...
Connections
Causes Loren Rhoads Supports
Clarion Write-a-Thon
Nanowrimo
Loren’s Favorite Books
Tinker at Pilgrim Creek, A Natural History of the Senses, How We Die, Something Wicked This Way Comes, American Gods, The Bloody Chamber, Owls Hoot in the...
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