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| Below I have posted some samples of my writing from the award-winning 417 Magazine. | |
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Girls of Steele Click here to read the full article in .PDF. People who have no practice telling twins apart may experience confusion in the company of Amber and Britney Steele. The fourteen year-olds have clear, blue eyes, straight, dark blond hair, round faces, and charming smiles... If telling them apart is tricky, then it is nearly impossible to know, unless you’re familiar with the girls and their family, which one suffers from type 1 diabetes. |
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Saved By the Dinner Bell Click here to read the full article in .PDF. Steven Roberts is dressed in a worn white chef's coat with tattered white buttons and patches sewn on the left breast with gold and black thread. The coat is from his days as a cook and student at the Victory Trade School... |
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Authors of the Table Round, or How to Start a Workshop Click here to read the full article in .PDF. On the first day of the fall semester I passed out the Storyteller assignment sheet to my Writing I class at Missouri State: expectant, sleepy faces. I had to remind myself that my students, while mostly eager to learn, wouldn’t be as fanatical about writing as I am. I’ve been writing for thirteen years; this summer I organized what has now become the Creamery Writing Workshop run by the Springfield Arts Council... |
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Wayne Morelock Profile Click here to read the full article in .PDF. The walls in Wayne Morelock's office are painted a bright, comforting, smiley-face yellow. They almost glow. His desk is wide, with a computer monitor, and there's a flat-screen TV in one corner. Large nature photographs decorate the west wall... |
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417 Home Projects of the Year Click here to read the full article in .PDF This is a feature article for 417 Home. The cover story I wrote consisted of an introduction plus 4 winners (1 overall winner and the winner in 3 subcatagories: basement, kitchen, and addition). Photos taken by Edward Biamonte. “Rules of architecture are calculated, I presume, to give symmetry and just proportion to all the Orders and parts of a building in order to please the eye. Small departures from strict rules are discoverable only by the skillful Architects, or by the eye of criticism.” |
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What It Feels Like... Click here to read the full article on my blog. One of my specialties is Oral History. This is an interview—transcribed and edited—with Daniel Woodrell, bestselling author of Winter's Bone and The Death of Sweet Mister, whose novel Woe to Live On was made into the major motion picture Ride with the Devil by Ang Lee. From the interview: The novel came out in 1987 and disappeared with scarcely a trace. I thought that was the end of it. It’s the lowest-selling book I’ve ever written, even though a lot of people love it. |
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The Sony Reader Click here to read the full article in .PDF Last Thursday I found myself sitting in coach class on an American Airlines McDonnell Douglas MD-80 to San Francisco, seat 16E, between my girlfriend and an 80 year-old woman doing a crossword puzzle... But as the plane taxied out to the runway, I encountered a predicament I never expected when I agreed to write this review: until we reached cruising altitude, I was told, I had to turn off my book. |
| Fiction | |
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The Memory of Liars: This opera, on which I served as librettist, will premiere at the Boston Conservatory in April 2009. The music is by Andrew Paul Jackson, a talented composer and student at the conservatory. The story is based loosely on To Kill Rasputin, a scholarly examination by Andrew Cook, and chronicles the mysterious death of the infamous Siberian monk (at the hands of Felix Yusupov and his bumbling band of traitors).
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