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The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem book cover

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Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead?

Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.

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Finding the Value of National Novel Writing Month

It is already five days into National Novel Writing Month and I don’t have much to show for it. Another National Novel Writing Month “competition” has arrived and I am, once again, most likely not going to have fifty thousand words written by the end of the month. In all likelihood, I will abandon the novel I started planning a few months ago but only really decided upon a few days ago, and I will not look back upon the text until next year, when I wonder what I have been doing for the last eight years.

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This Other Eden Review

I received a review copy of This Other Eden from Dybbuk Press recently and read it over the Passover holiday. I wasn’t really sure what to expect as I was going more on the name of the book than anything else. I was surprised by the six stories in this collection — five of which were printed elsewhere previously. Though each of the stories is grim in nature, they all have glimmers of hope within them — somewhat reflective of how life itself can be.

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National Something Writing Month

I probably should be writing right now. I mean, I am writing right now, but I should probably be writing my latest attempt at an entry for the National Novel Writing Month. I am currently many thousand words short of where I should, in theory, be if I want to have written fifty thousand words by the end of the month. I guess it will just have to wait until after I’m done writing this!

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Kate: Chapter 18

A cup was filled with coffee. Jean-Michel Pinot added two teaspoons of sugar and a dash of soy milk, purchased of course at a small deli and made that morning by the owner of the deli. His therapist was a strong supporter of natural foods and not eating animal products whenever possible. He did not have such strong feelings about avoiding coffee, however, as she probably brewed about five or six pots over the course of the day. True, the majority of the coffee was given to clients, but Dr. Rosenbaum had her fair share.

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Kate: Chapter 17

“Looks like somebody’s just about ready to have tea for two, or maybe tea for two hundred by the looks of it. I wasn’t planning on bringing a small army with me – was there something you hadn’t told me, Jean-Michel?” That was Kate, standing behind him.

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Kate: Chapter 16

Browsing somewhere around the self-help section, Felix felt two hands cover his eyes. He then heard what he assumed to be the voice of the person to whom the hands belonged say, “I’m going to give you three guesses, and one of them had better be right.”

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Kate: Chapter 15

Sandy stared straight up at her ceiling as she lay on her back, which seemed a bit silly as her room was mostly dark, other than a tiny patch of light that was coming in through her window. Friday seemed particularly long this week, but this was probably related to how early Shabbos came in and that she had some people in her apartment that night for a meal.

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