Wrong shipping date confuses book buyers and me too

I was flummoxed (yes, flummoxed) to see my historical novel "Zeppelins Over Denver" listed for pre-order on Amazon.com with a shipping date of Nov. 19. On the product page, a May 5, 2026, pub date is listed and that is correct. At the same time, I was holding a copy of "Zeppelins" in my hands, wondering why an entity such as Amazon, which can speed a supply of Dude Wipes to me overnight, wants readers to wait until almost Thanksgiving for my first novel. I have alerted the site's problem-solvers and hope for a quick solution. I mean, the book is worth waiting for, might even make a great holiday gift, but I may be an old man before that comes around. Pause for fact check: I am an old man now, typing this with the same four fingers I used on typewriters and keyboards since the 1970s when I was putting my first words to paper. Yes, paper. So, if you are anxious to read a novel set in 1919 featuring characters out of The Great War in Europe, leave a comment and I will sell you a copy and mail it the old-fashioned way. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" now available to pre-order

On April 24, I guesstimated that "Zeppelins Over Denver" would be out by summer. You have to be careful with these things as publishing tends to take time and you don't want to get readers' hopes up unnecessarily. 

"Zeppelins" is now on pre-order (May 5 official pub date) at your favorite bookstore or even from your least favorite big-box outlet that places book bins somewhere among twelve-packs of underwear and rows of gleaming BBQ grills. 

My goal is to get the book into local stores and those in my old stomping grounds of Wyoming and Colorado. It's a bit tricky because the book is set in Colorado, specifically Denver, in 1919. I'm now officially a Florida resident, a return to my roots and the comfort of family. My Colorado roots go back to 1919 when all of my grandparents decided Denver was the place to be. 

My grandmother Florence decided to extend her tenure as an army nurse in France to the new army hospital in someplace called Aurora. There she met and married my grandfather Raymond, a cavalry officer from Iowa who left the war with lung problems so they shipped him to the hospital that eventually became Fitzsimons Army Hospital. Cavalry officer met nurse and there you go. 

My Irish immigrant grandfather Martin left sweltering Chicago after having a lung surgically removed due to empyema. The surgeon urged him to recuperate in a drier clime, Arizona, for instance, or maybe Denver. He chose Denver. Grandmother Agnes, the first postmistress of a tiny town near Cincinnati, jumped into a Model T with her sister and two gal-pals and drove the rugged road to Colorado. She and her sister decided to stay while the others returned to the banks of the Ohio. Martin and Agnes met at the Hibernian Club and one thing led to another and here I am.

That's just background. The setting is important to me as I was born in Denver, did some of my growing up there, returned after college to work, left Denver to go to grad school up I-25 at CSU, and then moved north to Cheyenne to work for the Wyoming Arts Council for 25 years. Retirement party with great homemade pie on a Friday in January 2016. On Monday morning, I sat and started writing this book.

Co-worker at retirement party: Hey Mike, whatcha gonna do after retirement? You can't just sit around, you know. 

Me: I'm gonna sit around and write a novel. A historical novel.

Co-worker: That's nice. Give me another slice of that pie.

Ten years later, I'm in Florida and I have a book. Easy as pie.

Stay tuned here for more updates. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" due out by summer

Just finished reviewing the galley proofs of my first novel. My first published novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was in my 20s. I actually started earlier, as a kid writing letters that were rarely answered. My first readers were disinterested friends and family members. Maybe that’s where I learned how to hold an audience. Most of my early writing had an audience of one. I discovered journaling and keep up that written practice with this blog. I registered with the original Blogger from Pyra Press in 2001 and posted my first weblog in November 2005. I began blogging regularly in January 2006.

But back to the novel. The title is “Zeppelins Over Denver” and it will be out in May from The Ridgeway Press of Michigan in Detroit. Publisher and friend M.L. Liebler helped me get the ball rolling and I am forever grateful. Small presses rule! Big presses are great too but they have spent a lot of time ignoring me. C’est la vie! I was learning how to write all of this time, from the early 1970s until now. I’m still learning. Always will be.

“Zeppelins” is a historical novel set in 1919 Denver. Its origins lie on the yellowing pages of my paternal grandmother’s diary from her time as a U.S. Army nurse in France, 1918-19. She kept one diary in her lifetime and it was lost for decades, existing only as a rumor that faded with each passing year. It was rediscovered in my sister Molly’s basement in Tallahassee. She’s a nurse like our mother and my father’s mother. Eileen, another sister who also was a nurse, took the diary and transcribed it. She asked me for editorial assistance. As writer and editor, I gladly provided it. I whipped it into shape, working more as a conservator than a fiction writer. I corrected spelling and punctuation. I changed no contents, censored nothing. It was lovely just the way it was.

Eileen asked me to put together a little book for the family. Along the way, I researched the service of army nurses in the Great War and the Great War itself. I thought I knew at least some of the history. I had read war novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Good Soldier Schweik,” “Soldier of the Great War,” and “Winter Soldier.”  I had read “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman and Paul Fussell’s excellent “The Great War and Modern Memory.” I’ve read the poetry: Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. I have read some of the celebratory war poetry, too. Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees" was my father’s favorite poem. I wondered if Dad had contemplated the shattered trees in the Bulge battlefield in the Ardennes in 1944. Kilmer’s reputation lives on at Columbia University’s annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. The Columbia Daily Spectator once ranked the contest as number one among the “Best Columbia Arts Traditions.”

The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew. I dug deeper. In the end, I decided to absorb everything I knew and let it come out in what I see as a historical novel colored by the darkly humorous war novels of Joseph Heller, Juroslav Hasek, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And there you have it. Ten years of work poured into almost 400 pages. I hope you enjoy it. If you are inspired by the characters, some of them will return in the sequel, “Patrick of the Mountains.” The draft manuscript is complete and it will be published once the edits and revisions are complete. I have roughed out a plot for a third novel but we will see where that goes.

In praise of Large Print books: "Seeing is Believing"

Wichita, 1962. I read Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books in bed with my Boy Scout flashlight. It was after the parents’ call for “lights out” and a brighter light might have awakened my brother who would want to talk about trains. He spent many hours with his model trains, vowing that one day he would pilot locomotives across the prairie. Instead, he learned the air traffic controller trade in the USAF and spent his career assisting pilots through the crowded skies.

I am about to turn 75 and I need more than a Boy Scout flashlight to read at night or any other time. Kindle, you might say, with its lit screen and adjustable type. Done and done. I love my Kindle. I’ve read some smashing books on it. Big ones, too. In 2022, I read “The Dark Forest” by Cixun Liu, the second book in the “Three-Body Problem” series. A long one at 528 pages. It was a slog sometimes, but the highs outnumbered the lows. Made me watch the first part of the Netflix series and make sense of it. Part Two coming up! 

I always miss holding an actual book. Something magical about sliding a book from a library shelf and opening it to that first page. The feel of it, the smell, the look. Lately I’ve been exploring the Large Print section at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It features lobby racks of new LP books in a section dedicated to donors. In the stacks, the library features aisle after aisle of LP books and CD books for the audible (and Audible) oriented. LP can stand for large print and also LP as in Long-Playing records. LP, record, or album – all terms we used for our 1970s purchases from Peaches. We played those Zeppelin disks long and often and appreciated their albums of songs which live in our bones. We annoyed our children by singing them badly and loudly on car trips. For them, LP might mean Loud Pops.

During my many decades at libraries, I paid little attention to the Large Print sections. They’ve grown as Americans age, especially our large cohort of Baby Boomers. Us. Me.

In the Ormond Beach Public Library’s “Miscellaneous Large Print” section, I saw a red trade paperback that outshone the others and plucked it out. It was “These Precious Days,” a collection of essays by Ann Patchett. I recently read (on Kindle) my first Patchett novel, “The Dutch House” and loved it. Beautiful writing, compelling characters, and a story I wasn’t sure about sometimes. But by the end, I was impressed with the tale of the Conroy family and their creaky old house outside Philadelphia. The writer made me pay attention to the characters as the story unwound and that takes skill. I will read more.

I just did. I checked out Patchett’s essays and read them. With an essay collection, the reader can pick and choose.  “A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities” was not my first choice. A bit dry, perhaps, nothing like “The Paris Tattoo” or “Eudora Welty: An Introduction,” Welty one of my favorite writers.

When I got to it, her talk to the humanities deans grabbed me. She wrote about her days as a grad student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was around the same time I went to the grad school MFA program at Colorado State University in the last half of the 1980s. There was a generational difference (she 22, me 37) and a gender one. But our experiences were similar in several ways. She had some great teachers and mentors but also some not-so-good ones. She scrambled to make ends meet and so did I. Her fellow students could be annoying but you put a bunch of creatives in cramped quarters and you get conflict. She sums it up: “My MFA showed me the importance of community.” That was my reason to do it and I did find community.

Patchett’s essays are marvelous, as marvelous as her novels (see my comments on “The Dutch House”). I was impressed by the cover art, a painting of the author’s dog Sparky by artist Sooki Raphael. The title essay is about Patchett’s friendship with the artist. It’s long, as essays go (88 pages), but it’s the heart of the book. Feel free to cry.

I was pleased to see that Patchett’s essay collection was issued by Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Harper Large Print had a farewell message for me and other LP readers:

“Light and easy to read, Harper Large Print paperbacks are for the book lovers who want to see what they are reading without strain. For a full listing of titles and new releases to come, please visit our website: www.hc.com.”

This final thought in all caps: “SEEING IS BELIEVING!”

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

John Fabian Witt’s new book asks if the American Experiment can be saved

Beginning Oct. 16, I will be reading John Fabian Witt’s book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I ordered the book after reading his guest essay in Monday’s New York Times, “How to Save the American Experiment.” The graphics caught my eye, a drawing of a big red hand pushing down on a platform and a group of people pushing from below. The Big Red Hand looked like it belonged to a marble statue or a giant, ponderous and huge. During other times, the resisters might be labeled “the people” or “the masses,” The Masses being one of the leftist mags of the 19-teens (later New Masses).

In any case, Witt’s essay grabbed my attention. How do we save the American experiment? I’ve been asking that very question since Trump took office for the second time. I have good days and bad. This essay gave me some hope.

Witt captured me when he talked about how a messy war and a pandemic bred a decade of strife that ended in a failed economy and then to a surprising resurgence.

Yes, the 1920s. A time of race riots and red-baiting and the Insurrection Act. Unions pushed workers to organize and the workers protested and were clubbed by guys that acted a lot like 2025 ICE Storm Troopers.

Hard times followed by harder times followed by a global war that birthed the U.S. as a global power. Until it lost its way.

I am obsessed with the 1920s. I just finished writing a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado. It will soon be published by Michigan’s Ridgeway Press. Its characters come to Colorado to start anew after war and sickness and failed dreams. They come to reinvent themselves. Colorado, Denver in particular, has always been a place for people to find themselves. Find gold, too, whether it be the actual metal or penny stocks or pot farms or the fresh powder of mountain ski slopes. As a native Denverite, I admire the magic but know the shortcomings. Historians such as the late David Halaas and Tom Noel have helped me delve into the past. I was a childhood fan of the Denver Public Library and spent many adult years in the Denver History Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A wonderful place. I don’t live there any more. Why? I’m, an American. I move on. It’s what we do. I’m now back to Florida. As you know from late-night comedians, Florida has its own problems.

Witt’s message is not so much “move on” but dig in, into those entities that make a difference. He writes about Charles Garland, a millionaire who used his fortune to fund the American Fund for Public Service or the Garland Fund. It was overseen by muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin. They funded entities that pushed for civil rights, a living wage, and, in the 1930s, Social Security. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency petered out and led to the totalitarian tendencies of Harding and then to rich-boy Democrat Roosevelt who surprised us all, both hard-right Wyoming ranchers and big-city liberal labor agitators.

America, the Arsenal of Democracy, helped win the war and reaped the fruits of its labor and good fortune to bring prosperity in the 1950s and its most annoying demographic cohort, the Boomers. Say what you will about us but we helped the good times roll and now, well, we face the same political shitstorm as our offspring.

So, I write scathing letters that seem to fall on deaf ears. I support organizations such as the ACLU and the Florida Democrats and Wikipedia which is now under attack by the MAGA crowd. I support the independent WyoFile in Wyoming and the Independent Florida Alligator at UF, my alma mater. They are all under attack and need us. Protests are great but pointless if you don’t act and then vote in 2026 and 2028.

As the actor astronauts in “Galaxy Quest say: “Never give up…and never surrender.”

Fiction writers bring new life to dusty historical figures

Last night I finished reading "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" by Jerome Charyn. A beautiful novel, wonderful historical fiction. Charyn has made waves the past couple decades with his unorthodox takes on historical figures: Dickinson, the notorious Orson Welles/Rita Hayworth relationship, famous recluse J.D. Salinger, and Johnny One-Eye in the American Revolution. There are hundreds of other lives worth a second or even third look by someone of Charyn's skills. ,

Historical fiction is my new reason for living past 74. I've written two HF novels, the first will be out later this year from The Ridgeway Press in Michigan. I'm editing the second now. In the process, I've grabbed as many books off the HF shelf as I can muster. I was floored by "James" by Percival Everett, "Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler, "Horse," by Geraldine Brooks, "Gone, the Redeemer" by Scott Gates, and "Clark and Division" by Naomi Hirahara. 

All this innovative HF isn't without its detractors. Some traditionalists say that writers are playing fast and loose with the facts. Some say that facts are facts and that the timelines of history should be respected. They're valid points. Some HF writers are dogged with the facts. And so are some HF readers. Some writers also have hordes of researchers to help their work, as was the case with James Michener as his career progressed. He was so intent on research that he has a library named after him, the James Michener Library at University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. I've devoured Michener's novels most of my life, first "Hawaii," recommended by my mother, and onto "Centennial," the first novel I bought when I moved back to Colorado after college, and on to "Chesapeake" when I lived in Maryland.

But I also love the art of fiction and don't mind it being bent and twisted for a good yarn. I loved the real underground railroad in Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" and I was totally caught up in Jim's journey in "James" even when the story veered away from Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" which, of course, was also fiction. 

This reminds me of arguments about creative nonfiction during my days as an M.F.A. student. Annie Dillard was taken to task for some inventions in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." It led to a prize-winning book so I'm willing to forgive and forget. Others aren't. Remember that CNF stands for "creative" nonfiction.

It may be that I'm too old to care about literary minutiae. Or that I'm too pissed-off about MAGA savageries to mind when a writer invents something lovely to read.

A bit of both

Author Michael Connelly delves into Florida experience for next streaming series

Michael Connelly, best-selling author and UF and Independent Florida Alligator alum is now writing about his days as a reporter in Daytona Beach in the 1980s. He’s also writing about his time covering crime in Fort Lauderdale which includes forays into the South Florida cocaine wars.

I met Connelly in the first part of this century at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. I came to town for the Wyoming Arts Council to meet with colleagues at WESTAF, our regional arts organization. Now Creative West, it keeps track of the MAGA attacks on the arts funding world through its Action Center. 

I waited in a long line to meet Connelly at the L.A. Bookfest at UCLA and he signed two books because I wore my Gators cap. The Gator connection led him to take a book tour detour to Wyoming a few years later and many fans turned out.

The first Connelly novel I read was "The Poet" (1996) because it was a mystery about poetry (I thought) and it's set among the two Denver newspapers I once worked for. From 1978-82, I was writing in-depth articles about prep football, college hockey, and the Coors Classic cycling race. After that, I was managing editor and columnist for Up the Creek weekly which had its origins covering rec softball leagues and wet T-shirt contests at Glendale singles bars. I still have clips if you’re looking for something to read about the halcyon days of the 80s.  

In The Poet, Jack McEvoy is a crime reporter for The Rocky. When his twin brother Sean, a Denver homicide detective, is murdered. McEvoy pursues the story. He finds  his brother’s murder was staged, and uncovers a pedophile ring which leads to other murders committee by a serial killer known as The Poet because he features Poe in his killings. I was impressed. I read more and now have quite a collection. The book won 1997 awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. 

When I moved to Denver in 1978, the RMN and Post were battling for readers. The Post won the fight.  

When I met Connelly in L.A., I asked if he ever made it to Wyoming. His answer, as I suspected, was no. I asked if he might take a 100-mile detour from his next Denver book stop if we could find funding for a presentation, reading, and book signing in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s oft-neglected capital city. He put me in touch with his agent and the YMCA Writers Voice chapter wrote a grant and brought him to town. An SRO crowd came to the Y’s meeting room where an arts exhibit arranged by my wife Chris was on display. A great time was had by all. Barnes & Noble sold a lot of books.

That meeting room is now forever empty. The Cheyenne Family YMCA closed its doors for good yesterday. No more swimming pool. No more creaky weight machines. No more Writers Voice.

I send whatever I can to arts organizations in Wyoming, Florida, and elsewhere. I will report on some of those entities in the coming months. The anti-arts savagery shown by Trump and his minions have taken a big bite out of the creative industry. Not surprising since arts and arts education were prime targets of Project 2025.

I hear from poet and performer M.L. Liebler in Detroit that “all of our programs getting money from the NEA has collapsed.” Medical research funding has also been hit: “All research on cancer has been halted.”

If androids dream of electric sheep, why are there no sheep in my dreams?

I discovered Philip K. Dick and his mind-blowing novels at just the right time. In November 1975 I was a non-trad student at the University of Florida. Non-trad because many in my 1969 high school graduating class had claimed their diplomas and were now looking for work in all the wrong places. Meanwhile, we laggards and slow-learners were on campus with a younger crowd and a passel of Vietnam veterans. And the Krishnas -- can't forget them and the Krishna lunch. 

I spent many of my waking hours at the library where I gobbled up novels I missed reading in high school and copies of Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, and any other pub that featured great writers -- Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Eszterhas among them -- and Esquire carried Harry Crews' Grits column and its annual dubious achievement awards. I learned snark from the witty DA awards and writing through Crews in print and in person in his creative writing class. 

A profile of PK Dick arrived in the Nov. 6, 1975 Stone. Great graphics by G.K. Bellows showed the author, book in hand, with an alien invader coming through his window. The header: "The True Stories of Philip K. Dick: Burgling the most brilliant sci-fi mind on Earth -- it is Earth isn't it?" Paul Williams wrote the piece. Was this the same Paul Williams from TV and film? No, it was Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, who RS called "the first rock critic" and who died in 2013. He also loved sci-fi.

So I had to look up the RS piece. I printed it out and the type was too small for these tired eyes. So I enlarged the e-piece and read the whole thing. I remembered most of it from '75. I found as many PK Dick books as I could, in libraries and second-hand bookstores, and wrapped "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" into the folds of my brain that also held Shakespeare in Elizabethan English, Chaucer in Middle English, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dreamscapes, all from my UF classes. All in books. 

Williams notes in his final paragraph that some PK Dick movies were being discussed. "Blade Runner" came out in 1982, just a few weeks after PK Dick died. It blew our minds. It wasn't Dick's novel but it was beautiful. There now is a Director's Cut and a Final Cut as well as sequels. And many movies based on other novels. 

What is PK Dick thinking out in the Bardo? You may have to go to Colorado to get an inkling of that. Dick's ashes were interred in a Fort Morgan, Colo., cemetery next to the grave of his twin sister who died at six weeks. She is the basis of the "phantom twin," a recurrent theme of his. Fort Morgan was in the middle of the Dust Bowl in 1928 so I assumed the worst about the sister's fate. Go to Fort Morgan on a winter's day in January. Stand outside in the winter gales and think of the many things that could doom an infant in 1928-29. 

Dick, who lived most of his life in California, including mystical Marin County, is buried on the prairie. Only 112 miles from my one-time home of Cheyenne, Wyo., the setting of Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," an alternate history of World War II (the Allies win!) in "The Man in the High Castle." Dick had the mountains and prairie in his bones which made the Rocky Mountains the best place for the opposition to the Japanese and German conquerors on the coasts.

Dig up that '75 Stone article and find out about the author's situation in a tumultuous year, 1971. There's a mystery at the story's center: why did someone burgle Philip K. Dick's house in San Rafael, blow up his 1,100-pound asbestos-and-steel safe, home to his precious manuscripts, and flood the floor with water and asbestos? All sorts of wild things were going on in 1970s California. Dick posits possibilities and Williams follows leads to no avail. 

The answer is out there somewhere.

Bill Bryson’s “One Summer, America 1927,” when “America First” came to call

As I read Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927,” I realized that our history is comprised of an amazing number of knuckleheads and heroes. And sometimes, they are one and the same.

Charles Lindbergh, for instance. He became a hero overnight when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic Ocean, the first solo flight by airplane. Many had attempted it. This scrawny bland fellow from Detroit accomplished it. Thousands of Parisians swarmed him when he landed at Le Bourget Airport. Ticker-tape parades in the U.S. followed. Crowds greeted him everywhere. He often took to his airplane to escape into the wild blue yonder.

By the time the U.S. entered World War II, he was disgraced by his embrace of eugenics and Nazism. He participated in the first “America First” campaign and proudly wore an air medal awarded him in Berlin by Herman Goering, one of the architects of the Nazi scourge. He survived to be one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. “Lucky Lindy” tried to redeem himself by training American pilots in the Pacific during the war. But damage had been done. His name was stripped from all those streets and schools and airfields named in his honor.

You can still see The Spirit of St. Louis displayed at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum along the National Mall in D.C. I’ve taken my family there many times. The plane, so flimsy and tiny when compared to modern aircraft. It’s quite possible those other aircraft wouldn’t exist without it.

Bryson has been one of my favorite writers since his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.” Writing humor is no mean feat and he does it with aplomb in so many books. Humor helps you understand contradictions such as Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone. But that’s why I read, to be entertained and educated in the ways of the world. This book did that. I almost quit several times.

My sister Eileen gave me the trade paperback a month ago. She enjoyed it and knew I was working on novels set in the 1920s. I am of an age where reading big books with small type is difficult. I read to page 80 in bright light but put it down. Then I remembered I have a Kindle Reader for such challenges and I borrowed the book from Libby. Ah, a lit screen and large type. Heavenly. I still put it aside for other things until Libby warned me that I had only five days left on my loan. I hunkered down and read the rest, including a bit of the back matter. So much research!

Sitting in front of another lit-up large screen, I wonder about a century from now, 2125, when a book comes out about 2025. The year of Trump and A.I. Who will be the heroes and villains? As someone who’s been resisting Trumpism since 2016, you can probably guess my answer. “One Summer: America 2025.” A nonfiction tale, told with panache by someone. First we have to survive this period of U.S.-bred fascism and racism. First that. Will books survive?

Big Bill Thompson was mayor of Chicago in 1927. Chicago is in the Trump crosshairs as are all cities in blue states. Big Bill knew that to rule the people must be kept clueless so, writes Bryson, “he started a campaign to remove unAmerican books from Chicago libraries.” He even scheduled a bonfire to burn “treasonous books.” One city employee upped the ante:

“The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. ‘I now have an America First library,’ he said proudly.”

America First? Will that be the fate of Chicago’s libraries now that Trump’s goon squads are on their way?

"Old Girls and Palm Trees" by Meg Pokrass is a dream

I am reviewing a new book today but first wanted to outline the pleasures and dangers of late-night reading on the Fourth of July weekend.

I've read about the gender gap among White American Male Literary Fiction Writers, notably novelists. Upstarts such as Salinger, Hemingway, and Updike seem to be a vanishing breed. Guys whom you can't wait to read. Guys that hog the bestseller charts. 

I made the mistake of choosing Marc Tracy's July 3 New York Times article for late-night reading. My wife Chris was asleep, or trying to get to sleep as fireworks exploded around us in Ormond Beach suburbia. A few hours earlier we'd joined friends for dinner at a Flagler Beach bistro with a view of the rickety old pier under reconstruction. Made me wonder about hurricane season. The sky burned red as we drove west toward home. Should have taken that as an omen.

"The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel" was compelling reading. I am an old straight white man fiction writer who has published one story collection and written two as-yet-unpublished novels. I've published a number of short stories and a smattering of flash fiction and prose poetry. I left the corporate world to get my M.F.A. in creative writing. I wrote and raised a family while working full-time as an arts administrator, a rapidly dissolving field thanks to MAGA. Agents and editors will admit over late-night beers at writers' conferences that white guys aren't getting published because it's a new world out there, a new multigenerational, multiethnic, gender-neutral world out there. And young white guys are spending their 10,000 hours gaming and not sitting alone in a cafe populating their journals with trenchant observations. So suck it up, buttercup (what is a buttercup anyway? Must Google it). 

I am including a photo of a buttercup.

This buttercup looks happy. Or surprised. Or maybe it's surrendering. They can be poisonous and in the South they are seen as an invasive species. On the plus side, kids like to hold the flower up to their chins and the reflective petals turn skin the color of butter. Like butter!

Since I'm a buttercup, I ordered a nifty little chapbook by Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees." Published by Bamboo Dart Press, a nifty little outfit with offices in Claremont, Calif. It's illustrated by artist Cooper Renner, who has a playful style. I tackled this book late at night and it pleased me. Meg is a writer friend I met a dozen years ago on Facebook who wasn't afraid to put her flash fiction on display for all the e-world to see. She's from California but now lives in Scotland. Many writers, me included, were a bit concerned about placing our work on social media. Into what dark and dreary and corporate place will it end up? Any Tom or Dick, Harry or Sally, can scoop it up and claim it as their own. That occurred to Meg but didn't faze her, probably because she is represented by crackerjack agent Peg Mokrass who sports huge eyeglasses and looks a bit like Meg. So here it is, years later, and Meg had published some 900 pieces in various mags and online sites. And she's published eight flash collections and two novellas. I brought her to Casper, Wyoming, in September 2014, as a presenter at the Equality State Book Festival.  

The book is delightful. Can a SWMW say delightful? I await your response.

Meg's book features flash pieces about her imagined life with an old friend in California. In the opening piece, she imagines this old friend behind her, "a friend who had become a shadow that needed to be sewn back on." I had to stop there because this is a scene from the black-and-white "Peter Pan" I grew up on. Peter loses his/her/their shadow and has to sew it back on. I watched my own shadow for weeks after that, afraid if it came off I wouldn't know how to sew it back on. I close my eyes and remember that feeling. I'm scared, but also aware that my shadow is a living thing with its own life. It may have turned me to writing, as my Mom read Peter Pan to us after and I saw that words were kind of like a shadow of life, that the writer has thoughts and it travels down the arm for finger to make imprints on the page. Did I think that at five? No, I am imagining that now. Something magical was going on, I knew that much. Somehow I understood that knowing how to read those shadow words could open up new worlds to me. I was a nuisance. I read everything: cereal boxes, candy wrappers, billboards, and eventually magazines and books. I am still a nuisance; any printed matter within reach is not safe. I can read upside-down like a noir detective. So much joy and heartache comes from reading and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is joy and heartache on the pages of "Old Girls and Palm Trees." It is a dream, basically, and dreamily written. 

About the book: It's a chapbook, 6.5 x 6.5 inches. Well constructed, with a sturdy coated cover, and easy to carry on the Metro or to the beach (as we retirees do) in your E-Cycle or E-Tricycle basket. Nice gifts at $10.99. E-book version available but that kind of defeats the idea of having a nice little chapbook to carry around. As I mentioned, art is by Cooper Renner. Cover art by Meg and Dennis Callaci. 

Support small presses: www.bamboodartpress.com

How to choose art for the bare walls of a new house

It began with a June 19 Facebook post by artist Linda Anne Lopez of Winchester, Virginia. Linda and I met several times over the years. She's married to diehard reader and biker Ben Lopez, a longtime friend of my late brother Dan and his wife Nancy. They met in Santa Barbara while going to UCSB. Turns out they all moved to Florida for work and kids and riding motorcycles year-round. 

Ben is the most voracious reader I know and we trade book titles on FB. His most recent: a biography of Rudyard Kipling. My most recent is a novel The Sleeping Car Porter by Canadian author Suzette Mayr. I am now hip-deep in Carl Hiaasen's newest, Fever Beach. Ben sticks mainly to non-fiction and I'm a creature of fiction as that is what I write. And, sometimes, like these crazy times right now, who can tell the difference?

Linda got serious about her art after retirement. Photography was her thing. Along the way she discovered encaustic mixed media and that's what you're seeing here. 

Linda is  a bird-and-flower person which carries a lot of weight with me, a hummingbird admirer and gardener. She describes her specialty as Encaustic Mixed Media. She combines her love of photography with the ancient arts of encaustic. See further explanation below. Find out more at Lindalopezartist.com

And I spent most of my professional career in the art world, mostly in the realm of state arts agencies (SAAs), local arts funding, a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts, and dabs in arts and literary criticism. All of these worlds are being decimated by Trump and his goons but I will leave my political critiques to other posts on Hummingbirdminds and other rabble-rousing sites.

Linda got my attention with this FB post on June 19:

Hummingbird and flowers, encaustic mixed media, 8-by-8 inches, Linda Lopez

It got my attention because it is beautiful and because it features a hummingbird and flowers. I must have it, I told my PC, and contacted Linda. It was for sale and she also had a companion piece, shown in this June 25 FB post by Linda: 

Encaustic mixed media, Linda Lopez, work at left is 9-by-17 inches.

The new home this refers to is mine in Ormond Beach, Florida. They will be the first works of art to go up in our new home in a woodsy place called Groveside at Ormond Station. I plan to turn these bare walls into a gallery of sorts, one that will feature groups of pieces celebrating my wife Chris and me. These two pieces will hang above our dining room table which, strangely enough, matches the color schemes of the art. It will feature work by Florida and Wyoming artists with a Virginia and Colorado artist in the ranks. 

You might ask: Hey Mike, what, exactly, is encaustic? I will let Linda answer that:

Explanation and History of Encaustic 

Encaustic is a wax-based paint (composed of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment), which is kept molten on a heated palette. It is applied to an absorbent surface and then reheated to fuse the paint.  The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to the process of fusing the paint.  

 

Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Fayum portraits are the best-known encaustic works. These funeral portraits were painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. 

 

Modern encaustic painting was made possible by the invention of portable electric heating implements and the availability of commercial encaustic paint and popularized by its usage among many prominent artists. Encaustic paintings do not need varnishing or protection with glass. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, which is one of the major causes of deterioration in a paint film. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil. Buffing encaustic will give luster and saturation to color in just the same way resin varnish does. 

 

Encaustic can be used as a traditional painting medium, but it can also be used to create sculptures, with photography (transfers and prints), drawing, and printmaking (monotypes). Painting with encaustic is a multi-step process. First, the paint must be melted. Then the molten paint is applied to a porous surface. The wax is then fused into the working surface, allowing it to form a bond. As a final option, the cooled paint can be buffed to bring up the luster of the wax and resin. Every layer of encaustic wax must be fused. 

All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

Love in the Ruins is not just Another Roadside Attraction

I awoke thinking of Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World." I finished the 1971 novel late last night. It has a satisfying ending which I won't divulge. It's set five years after the main action of the novel. It wraps things up but I was still left with this thought: This is a satirical sci-fi novel about loss and grief. 

It struck me in the same way as the movie "Arrival." I had to watch the film a second time to understand the ending as well as the beginning and middle. I felt a bit dim that I didn't get it the first time around. The second time I wanted to cry. 

They gave Dr. Louise Banks the same gift the Tralfamadorians gave Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse Five." She became unstuck in time, gift from the Space Octopoids who came to warn Earth and seek our help for a future calamity. Dr. Banks saw her future tragedy but lived it anyway, a brave thing. 

In "Love in the Ruins," set in some future time, the 45-year-old Dr. Thomas More has already experienced tragedy in the cancer death of his young daughter followed by his wife leaving him. Oh yeah -- he also faces the end of the world. He does his best to assuage his grief and fear with scientific inventions, sex, and gin fizzes. Nothing works. "To be or not to be?" What does he decide?

Percy was the son and grandson of suicides. After a bout with TB during the World War 2 years, he became a doctor and then a mental patient at the same hospital. Percy suffered from Depression and PTSD just as war veteran Binx Bolling does in Percy's 1961 novel "The Moviegoer." 

He is well-known as the writer who helped publish John Kennedy Toole's "The Confederacy of Dunces," another award-winning New Orleans-set novel about an unhinged character. Toole, of course, committed suicide allegedly despondent when nobody would publish his novel. Suicide, I'm told, is more than a passing sorrow. It figures heavily in literature, especially Southern lit.

I almost quit reading this novel. Several times. It's wordy and Percy does a lot of showing off with language. In places, his humor is more Keystone Kops than dark satire. I did laugh out loud in spots. Dr. More keeps getting into messes he causes himself. A Buster-Keaton-kind of hero. 

I first read this novel when I was 23. I am now 74. In 1973, I saw it as a romp, the prof's great example of the dark humor of the ages. We also read Tom Robbins' 1971 kaleidoscopic novel "Another Roadside Attraction." That too was a romp with deep undercurrents and portents. Robbins was born in North Carolina and grew up there and in Virginia. He referred to himself as a hillbilly and his editor called him "a real Southern Gentleman." Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. Later on, he discovered Washington state where he wrote his books. 

I should reread Robbins' novel and see how I react 52 years on. It may mean something different to me in 2025. 

Sad days for poets, writers, and historians in Washington, D.C.

A. Friend (not a real name) told me that she and her husband are traveling to Washington, D.C., this week to see the National Museum of African-American History. They want to visit it before the Trump people purge the exhibits and dismantle the building. A. Friend is not a Trump voter, not even a person undergoing what MAGA calls Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS. She and her husband are just regular folks who visit museums and art galleries and historic sites during their travels. Over the years, she has sent me postcards from sites I never knew existed and I am the richer for it. 

Trump's Nitwits have already purged some of the exhibits from this museum. They have never met a museum they didn't suspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DIE which is an ironic acronym on its face. MAGA terms it DEI because, well IED was taken (Boom!) and IDE was too close to "Beware the Ides of March" which sounds too Shakespearean which might remind Idiocrats of a college English class they were forced to take in 1997. 

I wish A. Friend and her husband Godspeed and good luck. Make sure to take your REAL ID with you just in case there is an ICE sweep on the National Mall.

More bad news from D.C.: Trump's goons have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Program and canned its staff including Director Amy Stolls whom I have worked with. The administration had already rescinded grants to literary magazines and presses whose only crime was admitting to DIE. 

I am going to list them here because I have read some of their books and they might not have existed with the writer's non-profit publisher, often hanging on by a shoestring. Here are the names:   Alice James Books, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Open Letter Books, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, and Transit Books as well as such literary magazines Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, n+1, the Paris Review, and Zyzzyva.

I have read books from many of these presses. I will mention one. Brian Turner's first book of poetry was published by Alice James Books. Poet, essayist, and professor Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise, also published by Alice James Books on New Gloucester, Maine, a teeming metropolis filled with radical outfits such as the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, Pineland Farms, and the New Gloucester Fair. And one publisher. 

Brian's bio a pretty standard description of a contemporary American poet. But what's that part about the Iraq War? Oh yeah, Turner is a U.S. Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the historic 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Here, Bullet" knocked me out. The title poem will tell you more about war's realities than any non-fiction book. Go to the Alice James web site and buy the book. Better yet, buy all of his books and e-books which include individual poems. 

During my time as literature program specialist at the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought Brian to our fall 2012 writing conference in Casper to read from his work and congratulate the writers he had chosen for the WAC's literary fellowships. Later, he joined two other veteran writers on a panel to discuss the role of soldier/poet in "Active Duty, Active Voices," featured Iraq War veterans and writers Brian Turner and Luis Carlos Montalván. The panel was moderated by Casper College professor and military veteran Patrick Amelotte. Montalvan suffered from severe PTSD and wrote the wonderful memoir "Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him." He brought Tuesday with him to Casper that October weekend. I worked with the state's military coordinator to bring other service dogs and their handlers to the conference to demonstrate what they do. 

I wish I could just end this blog with another Liberal's complaint about our current situation. But I have a sad story to tell. In December 2016, the 43-year-old Montalvan was found dead in an El Paso hotel room. He had left his dog Tuesday with a friend. He killed himself and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Delivering the eulogy was Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Montalvan had persuaded Franken to sponsor legislation expanding the military dog program which passed a different Congress during different times. 

During his time in Casper, Montalvan said his favorite poem growing up conservative Cuban in South Florida was "Invictus." You know the one. It celebrates bravery. William Ernest Hanley wrote it and it's always been a favorite to memorize because it rhymes and is in iambic tetrameter. Montalvan memorized it. It ends this way: "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Rest in peace, Captain.

A good time to ponder "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World"

I am rereading "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World" by Walker Percy. He will always be a favorite of mine for his mournful yet witty 1961 novel of depression "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award and considered a classic. It's well known that Percy assisted John Kennedy Toole's mother get "A Confederacy of Dunces" published. Toole left the manuscript behind when he committed suicide. Percy had many suicides in his family: his  grandfather, father, and (probably) mother. As a teen, he and his two brothers were taken in by his uncle, a poet in Mississippi. The die was cast.

"Love in the Ruins" is set in a future Paradise, Louisiana. Percy, a trained physician and one-time mental patient, spent much of his life in New Orleans, the setting of many of his novels. 

Love in the Ruins" (Open Road Media 2011 version on Kindle) was introduced to me via a reading list for a contemporary literature class taught by Phil Drimmel at Daytona Beach Community College in 1973-74 At the time, I was returning to college after two years as a college dropout and survivor of the 1969 Selective Service Draft Lottery (#128). A 1969 high school grad, I had failures  behind me as a biology major and as a Navy midshipman. I traveled some and lived in an educated northern city where I thought I might be a nursing student like my girlfriend but decided to break with the girlfriend and return to Florida and pursue the lucrative career as a fiction writer. The joke was on me, of course, but along the way I read plenty of good books. 

Percy's dark humor was a good match for the time as I also was entranced with the books of Vonnegut, Heller, and Kesey. I read Rolling Stone mainly for its gonzo journalism and National Lampoon for its wicked humor. And, like Percy's character, I was also a bad Catholic, renouncing the title of Mr. Catholic conferred on me by the Knights of Columbus in Daytona Beach at our Catholic high school graduation awards ceremony. A 50-dollar U.S. Savings Bond came with it, a little something to help with my education or writing career or maybe even some bad choices.

"Love in the Ruins" 1973 was a different read that "Love in the Ruins" 2025. I didn't really get it when I was 22. I liked the satire of this imagined future and psychiatrist Dr. Tom More's journey. I was entranced by his Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer which reads the state of a person's soul and later is fine-tuned to read a person's mental imbalances. I was a bit creeped out by More's middle-ager's sex drive, my prudish Mr. Catholic eclipsing my own yearning for community college women. 

So I didn't get it all then. But now, I decided to pay attention to "another person's voice." That's what Borges told his students when they asked why they should read the books of others. 

This Bad Catholic is still reading this 1971 novel about an imagined Bad Catholic. I've been thinking a lot about this subject especially since Pope Francis's death. Just what is a Bad Catholic these days? Is it someone who religiously obeys every tenet of Catholic doctrine? Or all those questioners like Tom More, all those I knew from the 10:30 Catholic Community in Denver. Dutiful questioners all. 

Percy needs my attention, especially now. I am a bad Catholic living near the end of the world. A pope with the heart of St. Francis has died. The Antichrist is in the White House. Books from my past speak to me.

The book's July 3 section recounts a day in The Pit, the slang for the hospital's weekly Q&A among physicians and students. Dr. More speaks of his lapsometer. Meanwhile, a rival has arrived and hands out copies of the doctor's new lapsometer which disturbs its creator. 

As Dr. More says: "This device is not a toy. It could produce the most serious psychic disturbances... If it were focused over certain frontal areas or region of the pineal body, which is the seat of selfhood, it could lead to severe Angelism, an abstraction of the self from itself, and what I call the Lucifer Syndrome: that is, envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites."

All hell breaks loose in The Pit. Male and female students glom on to each other. A professor admires the beauty in a male student's face. Fistfights break out. 

Human appetites are unleashed with the predictable results. As one of the doctors tells More: "Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus's Dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times." 

Indeed. Maybe it takes a Bad Catholic to write about strange times.

I am at the 71% mark on Kindle. I will finish this book.