The Art of Storytelling

Image: a creek (pronounced 'crick' in the Springfield, Ohio dialect) I just celebrated a birthday this week which gave me license to...

Image: Rooster taking his daily constitutional. Yes, that is how he pees. Have you ever had such a great day that you just wanted to do...

Image: My bookshelf which is not in my backyard I'm not a big believer in the Not In My Backyard movement, but sometimes you have to put...

Image: words I did not write As a writer, I do not believe in writer's block. Even with this blog, which is for me the hardest type of...

Image: Sometime in the 1960s. The unreliable narrator is a common trope in fiction. While it can be done very well, I often see it used...

Image: Dick Smith, sometime around 2012 Friday, March 22, would have been my dad's --Dick Smith's-- 89th birthday. He died in 2016. My...

Image: the Red Wing Blackbird I always laugh at Groundhog Day and the idea that the little varmint can predict an early spring. It...

Do you remember, when you were a kid, playing with your food? I can remember shaping mashed potatoes into a mountain and digging a hole...

Growing up, my brothers and I had a love-hate relationship with fireworks. We loved them and our neighbors hated them. The truth was, we...

*Our Emotional Relationship with Money In my secret life as a Higher Education administrator who leads a team that includes our financial...

Image: The offending shoes on our wedding day I met my wife, Denise, when she was 16 and I was 17. We attended rival high schools and...

Image: Not camping in Ohio Did I ever tell you about the time we came home from the mall in the early evening and there was a line of...

Image: a fictional rendering of Jefferson in grade school *Find out how you can win a free kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and...

In August 1977, a few days before the death of Elvis Presley, my brother Andy and I were backpacking through the Great Smokey Mountains...

In this day of GPS taking us from doorstop to doorstop, many people forget what it was like to travel using a map, let alone to travel by...

It was just over a year ago that Love: a novel of grief and desire was published and over the 2022 holiday weekend jumped to the #1 New...

I mentioned in my last post that we didn't open presents on Christmas until later in the afternoon. That 'tradition' began when I was in...

I don't since and I don't dance, which means when the annual Christmas concert rolls around at church, all I can do is emcee, and share...

My high school English teacher, in her creative writing class, had a rule that we couldn't end a short story with someone dying. She said...

The Ogre Prince, a young adult fantasy, is the first novel I published. Written for my three children, when they were in their early...