Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Look for the Boy

A revolutionary man,
Who wears no black cape
Throws no bomb
Burns no building and
Kills no dignitary,
Is hard to find 
In a cast of thousands.

But look for the boy
Who has a fire in his eyes
That says he's been 
Alone too long,
And watch his world self-destruct.

If you had asked me just yesterday give you a short list of things I'd never put on this blog, poetry from my freshman year of college would not have made the list.  That's because the idea would have been so unthinkable, it wouldn't have occurred to me as being even a remote possibility.

But here we are.

Today my sister Sandy gave me a copy of a publication she had found among some items she's sorting through from the attic of the house where my family lived during my high school and early college years.  "I think you have a poem in this," she said.

The long, thin, illustrated booklet, a bit yellowed with age but otherwise in good shape, was the free poetry writers workshop anthology (all lowercase in the original) from the Experimental College at CSULB.  I don't see the Experimental College anywhere on the university's Website these days, so there are probably a diminishing number of us who remember its freewheeling opportunities for non-credit study of topics outside (sometimes way outside) the usual curricula.

I confess that I have corrected a couple of typos in the copy above.  But otherwise, it is as I wrote it.  I brought it home, where photographs from Norway stared back at me from a newspaper on the dining room table.

I couldn't (now, and perhaps not then) name the events that led me to write this poem.  I was eighteen. Now, almost four decades after it was published, I've seen far too much of the handiwork of those lonely boys in the time that has passed since I wrote it.  

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Jungle Red and other adventures

Safari (or Mozilla, or whatever browser works) over to Jungle Red, where Rhys Bowen interviewed me.  I talk about Disturbance, whether or not Irene is my alter ego, writing about "dark subjects," the Book Passage Conference, and Spoilerville.  Please stop by and leave a comment -- if nothing else, help me to reinforce the idea that the actual title of my new book is Disturbance.

I'm back from St. Louis and signed books today at Apostrophe Books.  Next week, I'm traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area.   Here's the schedule through the end of July:

July 21-July 23
Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
(Just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco)


Saturday, July 23, 2 PM
M is for Mystery
86 East 3rd Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94401
(650) 401-8077

Tuesday, July 26, 7-8 PM
Redondo Beach Main Library
303 N. Pacific Coast Hwy
Redondo Beach, CA 90277
310-318-0675
Free event.

Books will be available from Mysterious Galaxy, which will soon open a new store in Redondo Beach!

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Apostrophe Books this Saturday!

As you know, I'm heading to St. Louis for an event on Thursday.  But I'll be back in So Cal on Saturday,  July 16th for signing at a lovely bookstore in Long Beach, California — Apostrophe Books!  This store is in Belmont Shore between Park and Roycroft, next door to Starbucks.  (See map below -- click on the address to go to Google Map.)

I'll be there from 2-4 PM, and hope I'll see some of you who recognize parts of Las Piernas as belonging to your home town!

Apostrophe Books
4712 E. 2nd St
Long Beach CA 90803
562-438-7950



View Larger Map

Monday, July 11, 2011

St. Louis, here I come!

Hope to see those of you in the St. Louis area at this event -- just a few days away!

Thursday, July 14 at 7 PM
 (Doors open at 6 PM)
St. Louis County Library
Headquarters - Auditorium

1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd.

St. Louis, Missouri
314-994-3300

It's a free event.

Books will be available from Barnes & Noble.   See you there!


Image above by  spiroll on morguefile.com