Memoirous

Hey! I'm using large and obnoxious text to let all my fans and devoted readers and people who happen to stumble onto my blog: TODAY thru Friday you can order 2 of my most recent e-books   http://tinyurl.com/nlrvq2f http://tinyurl.com/omh79ao at Amazon for the sale price of 2 for $2. Usually Affirmations is $3.99 and Freeze Frame is $2.99 but for 58 hours only you can get both for less than $2. If you use Facebook get the word out to your writing students and writing teachers.  It's a back-to-school special! (Even if you're not taking classes--we all need affirmation and encouragement.)

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Liars' League NYC reading August 4th. I wasn't able to make it to hear my piece  Fungus Among Us being read by Heather Lee Rogers BUT--ta-da--it is now up live as a podcast. Go HERE to select my story and others read that evening. Invisible: Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2015, by Jennifer Sears Trace, by Aimee Mepham In Character, by Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino Rendez-vous, by Gus Ginsburg Past It All , by Wendy Russ  Going, by Christopher Green Gasoline, by Navid Saedi Melon Mall, by Jeanette Topar The End of Summer and Other Things, by Ingrid Jendrzejewski The theme was short & sweet, meaning flash fiction, so none of the readings is much longer than 7 or 8 minutes. Their next theme is Crimes & Misdemeanors and the deadline is August 31st. Why not submit! ? pic of Heather reading Fungus Among Us              

He’s Going Out Fred Burkhart   It’s the end of summer, and we’re melancholy at the turning of the calendar page. Change. As if between the 31 st and the 1 st the world skips a beat. August to September, a demarcation, an imaginary line has been crossed. There is no going back.   Fred Burkhart died August 30, 2014, nearly one year ago. And, nothing has been the same. I met Fred toward the end of his life. So much so that I agreed to be his power of attorney so that his medical choices might be carried through to the end. I wanted to make sure he went “gentle into that good night.”* Dylan Thomas. Little did I understand the man’s fighting spirit. He claimed it was his micro biotic diet, grass juicing, acupuncture, purified water, grapefruit oil, etc but I think it was his iron will. He always followed his own vision.   Fred was what is called an underground photographer. Not celebrities—unless they were infamous—but the everyday, down-an...

The Paris Wife By Paula McLain Review Are you a fan of A Moveable Feast ? Paris? The Lost Generation? Do you love that Hemingway style of short declarative sentences that tell it exactly as it is? The one true thing? But not so much of Hemingway, the man? Then The Paris Wife , might be right up your alley. I have gone through several life changes and Hemingway has been right there. A needling voice, as if he’s ready to box me, take me down to the tavern and drink me under the table, challenge me to a shark hunt. I’m energetic, but not even I can keep up with a man who blew through mentors, wives, and friends with a psychotic intensity. As a teenager I liked his Nick Adams stories, and at university I read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and was overwhelmed by the story’s simplicity—and how it captured loneliness in sparse language. But I also read for class his big-game hunting The Snows of Kilimanjaro and I didn’t like how women were portrayed. I began to see...

Great World Spin By Colum McCann Review Read this book on a device on my bike trip from Minneapolis to Chicago. It is a book that travels back and forth through time and place as if straddling a tightrope. A tightrope is one of the main focal points of the book—a story that spans the World Trade Towers and a dozen lives in between. It begins and ends in Ireland, but the majority of action takes place in Brooklyn. Prostitutes waiting for customers under a highway overpass and the kind-hearted priest who doesn’t exactly save them, far from it, but offers them a place where they can pee, clean up, if even momentarily before going back out to hustle. It seems like such a mundane thing, hardly a luxury or hand up/out. A service so small and yet human. “The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backwards.” McCann through a series of sketches, some spanning 50 or more pages, ...

The fact that summer is half over is ruining my summer. The mere thought sends a wave of autumnal heaviness over me, a blanket of wet leaves and leaden skies, a premonition of snow. The waves at the beach thicken and slow into slurry ice. The fireflies twinkling will grow fainter and fainter until they go south with the birds. It’s getting closer and closer with every distant clap of thunder and every clear, white sky day, with every Mexican popsicle and thrashing game of beach volleyball. I need to wring the last drop of warm sunshine, wade out to the second sandbar, dazzle into the lacy surf, taste the ripe berries, and let them burn on my tongue. On the Beach , 1929, Chicago. Gregory Orloff, Art Institute of Chicago

Day 7 Milwaukee to Chicago via Oak Leaf, WE Energies, MRK, and Robert McCroy, North Shore Channel paths 87 miles It was all downhill from here. Mostly. I was riding toward home. After 10 hours of riding I pulled in out back to park my bike in the basement. It was a hard trip on the days it was hard and a great ride on the days where I could be on bike trails and not ride into the wind. Doesn’t this about sum up any trip? good bye Milwaukee

Day 6 Poutine! In Milwaukee Lake Mills to Milwaukee 61 miles The rain started at 4 a.m. and went until 7. The road was a bit slurry as the cinders congealed into a stew to slow me down. Again I had low energy and had to ride 17 miles until I made it to a Mobil where I bought an apple fritter and a Gatorade. After powering up the miles just flew. In Douseman there is trailside a HUGE and expert bike shop. I know, I wasn’t expecting that either. A bar, yeah, even the smallest 1 corner place had a bar, but something as hip as a bike shop—I knew I was getting close to civilization. The bike doctors gave me a plug for my bar ends that fell out the very first day—probably when I threw the bike down in absolute exhaustion. The guys checked my brakes, said they were okay and printed off a map to help me connect to the New Berlin trail once in Waukesha. THANKS so much guys. Now I was on asphalt and the miles ticked off quickly. In Waukesha I got on the Internet for lik...

Day 5 Devil’s Lake to Lake Mills, self-register DNR campground 71 miles Once again the hills out in the a.m. were not as formidable as the hot afternoon before. I got to the Merrimac Ferry and was across “Lake Wisconsin” in 5 minutes. There was no big ascending hill up to Lodi where I finally came across a franchise. I had a flatbread pizza at Subway and that substained me all the way into Madison, where I arrived around 12 noon and ate once again at Subway, saving the second half of my foot long for later that night. farmland outside of Madison Lake Mendota I accessed the Glacial Drumlin trail in Cottage Grove by a combo of city streets and some paths getting out of Madison, not a problem. The GD is 52 miles straight across to Waukesha outside of Milwaukee. This trail can also get a bit monotonous—but it was flat and shady—what I needed that afternoon. In Lake Mills there is about a mile off the trail a DNR, Self-Register bike campground, Sand...

Day 4 Elroy – Devil’s Lake 44 miles Oh boy! Was this a hard day—I encountered the Baraboo Hills. First I had breakfast at the Bender Family Restaurant in downtown Elroy. Two eggs and tst came to $239—a GREAT value! I finished off the series of trails, the 400 (22 miles) and left Reedsburg around noon to start self-navigation road cycling. I was not ready for the intense sun, heat, humidity, and hills after the bike paths. I got a Gatorade and egg rolls at Kwik Trip in Reedbsburg but had physically and emotionally blown through them by the time I got to Baraboo. I arrived at the Circus Museum around 2 p.m. There was a gardner outfront who asked about my trip. He really seemed like he knew what he was talking about. There would be hills he said. If I could get to Rt DL I would have worked through them, but he really recommended me staying at Devil’s Lake. I hardly listened to him as I wanted to go well beyond Devil’s Lake and knew I had plenty of time to get to Lod...

Day 3 Perrot State Park to Elroy via several bike trails/paths 74 miles Each morning I’m packing up wet from the intense dew. After a Kwik Trip stop for egg rolls I finished the GRT (18 more miles) and picked up the LaCrosse River Trail (22 miles). I really had low energy and had to power through. I thought if the Elroy-Sparta is as boring as this it will be a long day. Got to Sparta and ate a picnic lunch at the depot. The Elroy-Sparta is 32 miles and the earliest rail-to-trail conversion having been built in 1967. Since I was a teenager I’ve dreamed of rising the Elroy-Sparta. After leaving Elroy I noticed a slight uphill. It was interesting terrain, a slow, steady climb. I was getting excited. At the top I saw a sign for ice cream. A guy was selling ice cream sandwiches out of his locker freezer. We sat and chatted and he said he’d always lived next to the tunnel. ?? He said the tunnel was nearly a mile long. I was sooo excited.  ...

Day 2 Hagar City to Perrot State Park 76 miles I was up and packed early. I ate only crackers before leaving, but made sure I had 2 water bottles handy. I wanted to attack the impending hill early before the heat got too bad. I probably started ascending around 7 a.m. and it WAS NOT as bad as what I encountered the day before. So rest, hydration, and beating the heat were key to the rest of the trip. There were wayside rests and historical markers. And, most importantly, the hills disappeared. Most of the smallish towns are about 7 miles apart. Even though there are bakeries in Maiden Rock and Stockholm, I was too early. I was able to find breakfast in Pepin at the Homemade Restaurant . Because my stomach was still not up to much I order 2 eggs and tst. The bill came to $5.89. I know eggs are getting pricey but I didn’t think it should be so much. A few days later I ordered the exact same breakfast and it came to $2.39. In both Maiden Rock and Stockholm there ap...