Drew McNaughton

Drew McNaughton can eat a soft taco in one bite. His fiction has been described by Kevin Canty, author of A Stranger in This World, Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero and Honeymoon, as “I don’t know, toss it out there… see what they say.” He keeps a machete in a chunk of wood outside his cinder block home for no reason, really. There’s deer that come and blink at the long blade of the thing, wondering.He can be contacted via e-mail at drewcmcnaughton@hotmail.com

Chickering Bog

I'm reading Winter World and Why We Run: A Natural History by Bernd Heinrich. I like animals, and Heinrich writes about them fluidly, without melodrama or weakness. His books on nature never fail to surpirse me, never fail to make me look at my world with keener interest and assurance, nor do they make me …

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The Dictionary

I was flipping through the old 1936 edition Webster's Universal Usage Dictionary housed at the coffee shop near my house. There's this thing called a Ducking Stool, which was used to dunk kids under water when they acted up in school. It was also used on witches, but that was less interesting to me than …

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Born On A Train

Though there is no title story for Jon McManus' collection of thirteen stories that's actually called Born On A Train, it's a hell of a title. The stories make me see how much it matters that there are still writers out there who we can call badasses. The collection rides roughly on the edges of …

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Tu Fu and me

I've been reading and teaching poetry for the past three weeks. Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems From The Chinese has just about the most kickass translations of Tu Fu anywhere. After you start reading those poems, you start living them. No kidding. I was driving along listening to the NPR fund drive and drinking a tall …

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Circus Smirkus

At school, Kelly Thomas had her butt-ugly sister telling everyone Vincent was too poor to go to the circus. The girls, they were the meanest, skipping rope singing "Vincent Harris wants to go. Vincent, Vincent, He's too po'."

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