Category: Patchworks
-
-
Freedom! …and a Sammidge
The scene last weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, a state that has recorded 15,000 COVID-19 cases and over 550 deaths. Armed protesters, organized on a Facebook group called Blue Igloo, paraded through downtown carrying shotguns, pistols, and a sweet AT-4 anti-tank rocket launcher. Thanks Facebook! When they got hungry, they marched into a Subway restaurant (remember former…
-
A Novel Coronavirus Novel
Will sustained isolation lead to a baby boom or a novel boom? Long before COVID-19, the most recent novel coronavirus to come along, I’d toyed with the idea of writing a novel called A Novel. As is usually the case in the life of a novelist, however, I ran into a few problems right off…
-
Cube Farm
BOGIE, or Why I Wrote Patchworks My second novel addresses gun violence in America. It didn’t start out that way. Patchworks‘ protagonist, a millennial grad student interning for peanuts within a government bureaucracy, didn’t appear until several months into writing. And, angry as I felt to see America shredded over and over again by episodes of massive…
-
Again
While we sit idly by No longer dumbfounded Just dumb Numb Gunman kills 7 in a rampage that started with a West Texas traffic stop
-
“The Whites…”
An ugly and violent upward trend divides us along ethnic lines today. In order to stay sane in the face of this spreading and dangerous hate, one need only look to Walter Sobchak, the right-wing nut job Vietnam vet (and convert to Judaism!) from The Big Lebowski… His utter disdain for his own dirty underwear…
-
Ten Questions
I am asked, “A book begins as an idea in the writer’s imagination. Eventually, this grain of sand turns into a pearl. What was the grain of sand that fired your imagination?” I respond: Orwellian signs in the DC Metro: “IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.” See what, exactly? Commuters staring empty-eyed at phones while…
-
For All You Novelists
Creative writing is a walk along a fine line. That line divides the seen and the unseen, the knowable and the unknown, the past and the future, cause and effect. Sanity and madness. Creative writers tread by feel to bridge the one and the other. For some the means is poetry. For others, memoir, essay,…
-
Bless Their (little) Hearts
It would be easy to give in to rage over this image in the NRA’s official organ, The American Rifleman. It would be natural and normal to descend into name-calling against them. But that’s exactly what the NRA wants, isn’t it? Emotional contagion. Rather than express my disgust at this callous provocation to violence, I’ll…
-
Speaking of Oscar
Previously blogged: Oscar KeyE is Dead. Long Live Oscar Keye. Rather than dwell on my dislike for all things Oscar Awards, trying to unravel the reasons for my disdain, I’ll revisit one thing I do love about Oscar: his utility as an early alter-ego. ‘Oscar Keye is dead and I am free,’ I wrote in…
Ben East Books 