Ben East Books

Grid of posts 2×3

  • Writers’ Resources

    Featuring two new resources for writers: Dactyl Review and Marylee MacDonald’s coaching blog. I came upon the first after engaging with the second by following the primary law of social media: be social. A quick exchange on Marylee’s blog pointed me the way to Dactyl Review, opening up a whole new platform for publishing book Read more

  • Maneater

    This review just slays it. Jason Overdorf hunts with a sharp pen and takes down Dane Huckelbridge’s narrative about what would seem a brutally interesting topic. And he doesn’t stop there. He spills ink like blood all over the slain author’s enablers: “He is not without accomplices in this crime against the English language, either. Read more

  • 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, Read more

  • 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 Read more

  • 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 Read more

  • Lords of the Flies

    We boys are to be left alone while the lynchpin of our home operation conducts child labor research in island-nation Philippines for the next seven days. The irony’s not lost on me. How long ’til we descend into savagery? Not to worry. Rather than cranking the inevitable conflagrant sounds we so admire, we’ll tuck ourselves Read more