drmstream[writing]

  I read a book the other day that is very pop­u­lar with peo­ple who are look­ing for answers to uni­ver­sal ques­tions.  The writ­ing was con­cise and clear, and the imagery was acces­si­ble, despite strik­ing me as overly sim­ple. Most strik­ing was the style.  Every chap­ter was short, every para­graph was short, every sen­tence was short. […]

  This is part of how it works when you write: the ideas come in frag­ments, start to form into peo­ple, places, sto­ries. You take notes on your imag­i­na­tion and then start writ­ing it out. Some­times the story flows and stops and some­times you feel your way into it. I was clean­ing up my hard drive […]

  This blog is an inad­ver­tent place, nei­ther com­mon­place book nor pub­lish­ing plat­form, dis­or­derly in approach but earnest in inten­tion, a bal­ance of self provo­ca­tion, hope­ful procla­ma­tion and inter­mit­tent dis­trac­tion. Despite its irres­olute intent, drmstream[writing] frames a rela­tion­ship for a kind-of writer and a kind-of audi­ence.  There is a group of you — a few […]

Detec­tive Sun­der­son walked back­ward on the beach glanc­ing around now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to trip over a piece of drift­wood. The wind out of the north­west had to be over fifty knots and the blow­ing sand stung his face and grated his eyes. It was below freez­ing and the surf […]

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had […]

This is where I am: An old man dying from can­cer, but still vital and bemused by the inten­sity of life, is walk­ing on a dark path that runs behind an old house down the hill to the run­down apart­ment build­ing he lives in. The lit­tle patch of woods is the byprod­uct of a geo­log­i­cal quirk. Millenniums […]

  I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work. “I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said. I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly dis­tinc­tive. He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his paint­ing. “I painted a very […]

  What I see clearly I pass by. What I see but do not see, I stand to wit­ness. My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee. All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see. Then […]

The woods ran up to the edge of the pond and every Spring the snow melt would reveal old trees that had crashed to the ground in the Win­ter freeze. We would pick our way around the sod­den husks, pull rot­ten rot­ten branches loose and talk about which trunks would dry out firm and hard […]

Some­times when I talk I hear my voice echo­ing in my head so I stop. In mid-gesture, mid-sentence, I’ll stop and go fol­low the echo. The moment that I am in — that absolute instance of inter­ac­tion — is sep­a­rate and unique from any other moment and I want to com­mu­ni­cate in a pre­cise and fresh way. The […]