drmstream[writing]

  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 […]

I know I have the life I have because of T.  Not just the things around me, but the way I see them. She gets the first Thanks. My chil­dren who have shown me that life is fueled by unsquash­able opti­mism get the sec­ond Thanks. My fam­ily who has pro­vided the foun­da­tion of mem­ory that forms […]

This pic­ture was taken at dusk in early May in my bed­room. I was 17 and fin­ish­ing up my final year of high school. My class­mate Eduardo was respon­si­ble for tak­ing the year­book pho­tographs; I was one of the hold-outs on his list. I was shy and dis­ori­ented. I still have the pho­to­graph that Eduardo […]

Secrets are dan­ger­ous things. My grand­mother hid behind her secrets. She car­ried them every­where. When she fought with my mother, she’d sit on the couch look­ing shat­tered. “It isn’t that bad, grandma,” I’d say.  She’d look away, whis­per­ing in a quaky voice, ‘You can’t know how bad it is, Danny,’. When I got older and […]

  You worked hard to keep us from see­ing you straight on, didn’t you? That was hard, I imag­ine, when you walked through your day with a cam­era around your neck. No, you put your­self on the other side. The other side of what, that’s what I won­der. Was it the other side of life altogether? […]

Don’t you love the com­mu­nity around your inter­ests and enthu­si­asms that you find on the web? You can’t repli­cate the expe­ri­ence any­where in real life: the vari­ety of view­points, the excite­ment of shar­ing and the feel­ing of val­i­da­tion that comes from con­sort­ing with peo­ple who see the world from the same angle but who are […]

My sense of self and my pri­vate desires got boxed in a mile high in the sky yes­ter­day. I almost didn’t make it through. I was fly­ing out to Los Ange­les for a busi­ness meet­ing. I had a win­dow seat in the front of the plane. An attrac­tive and com­posed young woman sat in the […]

Forty-eight days, ninety-four thou­sand and one hun­dred and sev­enty words. One novel done and the other half done. When I started, I had about 14,000 words of a novel that I had been research­ing and for­mu­lat­ing for more than a year. I didn’t feel the kind of momen­tum that told me the book was going to find […]

The rumor spread across cam­pus like the brush fires that sparked dur­ing dry fall after­noons at the mouth of Bloody Run: some­one had got a girl up the lane preg­nant. The Head­mas­ter knew. They were going to get expelled. At first we thought it was Sam. He had a ground floor sin­gle and he took […]