1. Acquire a flower – most preferably one with sentimental value, otherwise why are you even bothering. You need emotion to motivate writing.
2. Spread out each petal so that it lays flat on the tissue paper. Make sure the stem is gone because why on earth would you press a stem. Unless you are composing an Ode to Thorns, paired with the poetic balance of beauty and pain. Be still my heart.
3. Cover both sides of the flower with the tissue paper in order to soak up the fluid. Whilst doing so, formulate a simile about the tissue soaking up the lifeblood of the flower like the pillow soaks up your tears every night. Find other love-sick examples on the world-wide-web.
4. Place the flower in a tight vice, or for regular people, under a stack of heavy books.…
I couldn’t remember what I was dreaming, or if I was dreaming at all. But I knew I had been sound asleep. And I was rudely awakened by a random thought: Did I make James’s lunch for school? Damn it, Sharon, did you? I twisted under the blankets and turned onto my back. I stared into the darkness of my bedroom. Did I make James’s lunch for school? The question nagged. Was I going to have to get out of bed and check? Think, Sharon!
My mind revved like a reliable engine but churned out thoughts irrelevant for the late hour. I remembered tasks for later in the week, phone calls from two days ago, and which bills got paid for the month. My memory was blank each time I was able to circle back to James’s lunch.…
– Inspired by “The Night of the Gun” by David Carr
A recovering crack addict spoke, and I listened in close.
For the record, I’m not comfortable listening to the philosophies of any schmuck off the street. I wouldn’t grab coffee with a former sex offender to discuss the trials and tribulations of my anxious attachment style, as one can be a former sex offender as much as one can be a former bike rider.
However, I am comfortable hearing out a recovering junkie. They stayed on the ride until they were so sick they infected everyone in their sphere, but then somehow found the strength to confront the reflection in the mirror, see the wreckage staring back at them, and hop off to place their feet upon steady ground.…
I was sitting on the loading dock with Charlie, eating a rabbit sandwich. This was mid-November, now. Charlie shot the rabbit the day before, on a Sunday, in the woods behind his dad’s farm. I thought Charlie didn’t like me, you know. So I was surprised when he offered me a rabbit sandwich. We didn’t talk much. I was an out-of-towner. I was lucky to get a job anyplace.
Charlie usually sat in his truck, by himself, during the lunch break, staring out into the woods and smoking. Now I was sitting next to Charlie on the loading dock between two empty trucks, eating a rabbit sandwich. I didn’t want to eat it. I never ate rabbit before. But I took the sandwich, said ‘thanks,’ and I ate the sandwich.…
Morning. I look at my fuzzy chest in the bathroom mirror. What are these hard disks, like quarters, under my nipples? I’m a boy; am I growing breasts? I can hear the girls in my class giggling.
Last evening during homework, my father called me to the living room, and back at my desk, I couldn’t remember what he’d said, but I realized he had not yelled at me like the day before and the day before that and . . . The letters in the book swam like fish avoiding a bigger fish until the current in my eyes calmed.…
Joe my brother says, spitting smoke toward the ceiling. Another long story.
Joe I say. Joseph.
Guy is a year and a half younger. We’re both Joe. Another long story. He tips back in the recliner. We sit watching football in the parlor of our youth, monk-bald middle aged men sinking into furniture. I am back for the wail and wallow of an Italian funeral. No need to be coy; it’s my mother’s, she whose legacy was to withhold all the Italian except the swears. Let them be American. So at eighteen I left to be a real American, go to college in another city in the dead center of the country. You can’t (or at least you don’t often ) go home again. A very American story. …
Sophia Lambton reached out to me, a book reviewer, to review the first book in her series, The Crooked Little Pieces. Researching Sophia for one of my CLP reviews, I found out that she also writes music critiques, which at the time, my son, a frequent concert-goer, thought he might also like to try his hand at, and I asked for her advice. We struck up a correspondence that has grown into a friendship.
Sophia has also published a consummate biography of Maria Callas, and September 2025 saw the release of The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 5. (The interview has been edited for brevity).
Do you write with appeal in mind? That is, do you think about what people want to read?…
