In case you haven’t noticed it (and you probably have), there is a revolution going on in the world of publishing. When my first two poetry chapbooks came out in 1975, they were published by Tangent Publications of St. Paul, Minnesota, a partnership between artist David Genszler and myself. David had done some wonderful drawings for one of the books, We Play Each Other Like Jazz Musicians, we found a printer in St. Paul, and printed up about a hundred copies of each book. Ten years later wh...

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In a previous blog, I announced to everyone that my novel Seiji was finished. It was. Problem was it had not yet been given to an editor (though it had been shared with friends, whose responses were quite a bit less than, erm, "enthused" about it. After giving it to my editor here in Sapporo, Derek Chamberlain, I discovered that I had (and have) a lot of work to do to make Seiji the great story I want it to be. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and novelists. Here is what she has t...

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Sex, sexuality and sexual explicitness have long been controversial in the United States, where the attitude has traditionally been repressive and deeply laden with sexual guilt. Prior to the mid-1960s, sexually explicit books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were banned, copies confiscated, and booksellers intimidated for selling them even after the ban was lifted in 1961. It wasn’t until 1964 that the US Supreme Court declared Miller’s book not to be obscene and its sale protected...

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The other day while waiting for the bus on a beautiful, cold, sunny afternoon, snowflakes began to fall. I composed this little poem in my head, then wrote it down in my notebook afar taking my seat. Poems often come to me this way.


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This poem was inspired by a heart-rending, inspiring photo someone posted the other day on my Facebook page. My wife and I watched the tsunami as it washed over Japan's northeastern seaboard. Though unspeakably tragic, there is both poignancy and heroism in its aftermath. This is just one of them.  

 

Mother, Son

They found her 

in the ruins of her house,

buried 

under a mountain of debris.

Lying semi-face down,

one leg slightly cocked,

one arm stretched out,

her rescuers

hoped she might st...

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What makes a story a short story?

The most effective -- and creepiest -- short story I have ever read was a page and a half long in a paperback “pocket” book that I read back in 1954 or 55. I don’t recall the author’s name, but I do recall the story in every chilling detail. Set in the parking lot of a hospital at the end of her 3 - 11 shift, a nurse was getting into her car when a criminally insane patient she knew came up to her, killed her and ... well, you can imagine how the r...

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Seiji is off to the publisher in January. Watch for it sometime next year. Here is a brief introduction to the character and his story: 
 

At five feet nine and a half inches Seiji is taller than average for men of his generation. To see him in a crowd, you wouldn’t take him for anyone special; his rectangular-shaped face is so ordinary looking that it is easily missed. It is his way of walking and his eyes, which take in everything and express kindness and humor that catch one’s eye. That ...

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It's been a year and a half since I typed the first word. This morning at around 8AM I finished my first edit. In a week I'll do another go through and make changes, then it's off to the publisher after the first of the year. What a feeling, and what an adventure it has been! 

And then what? Could be the book about Mexico City ("The City Has Many Faces"), but is likely to be something else that I'll have more to say about later. Other than writing book reviews, mapping out the next book and re...
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Here we are already halfway through October, and I haven't posted a thing since August 29th. Part of my lapse was being out with a cold for 9 days, then needing to get out of the condo to get some badly needed exercise. Well, now I'm back, within a day or so of  having my "Seiji" novel finished (1st draft), then on to editing it and sending it off to a publisher. When that is done, I think I'll take my first month off from writing in about three years. I should; I have plenty of reading to do...
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“What are you doing, son?” the American soldier with the Japanese face asks.

“Drawing.” Seiji holds up a scrap of cardboard on which he has drawn a picture of his old neighborhood before Tokyo was firebombed and his neighborhood erased.

“Nice work!” the soldier says in Japanese. He squats down to have a closer look. “Is that all you have to draw on?”

“Mmmm, I found it over there.” He aims a charcoal-begrimed finger at a nearby trash heap next to the concrete remains of wha...

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My apologies for being tardy with posting on my blog. The main problem has been my laptop which is on its last legs and too unreliable to use. So I bought an iMac and found myself, as an old Windows user, beginning a new learning experience. It's been a challenge, and a happy one. I now have things figured out sufficiently to get back to my novel, book reviewing an blogging.

Now for the subject of reviewing books, something I've done in tandem with writing poetry and fiction since the early 19...
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This is one of my Grandfather stories, but without the Raven. It was inspired by a wildlife incident, recorded on NHK, the Japanese public television network, about a young female deer that had fallen through the ice on a Hokkaido lake. She was being harassed by a flock of hungry crows who were trying to knock her down. She lifted herself up onto the shore and went into the forest. In my story she appears at a farm owned by Grandfather Ueda. The story begins from there. 

Grandfather and the D...

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The Grocery Thief

 

 

I don't think there's a human being alive who is familiar with crows and ravens who doesn't think of them as thieves.

They rummage through garbage, steal crops from farmers, steal eggs from the nests of other birds, and kill their young.

Ask most anyone what their opinion is of ravens and crows and they respond reflexively “They're noisy, and they're all thieves and robbers.”

Then, with...

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Since it was a beautiful, sunny day, grandfather decided to walk along the Motsukisamu River, which was near the condominium where he and grandmother lived.

As he was leaving, grandmother said: “Now, you be careful of those dogs that run around there, because they bark, and they've been known to bite, especially one of them. That little monster is a vicious little gray devil with very sharp teeth, who has b...

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The next day when grandfather went out for a walk, the raven didn't appear until he was a good fifteen minutes into his walk and had stopped to admire a little league baseball game that was going on in a nearby park. As he stood there, he heard the sound of a creaking hinge coming from a nearby bush. Turning his head toward the sound, he saw a large raven sitting atop the bush, looking at him.

 “Is that you?” he as...

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Over the next few weeks or so I'm going to dropping some of the stories in my book Grandfather and the Raven. This is the first story one. The book, which is available in paperback and Kindle, is published by Night Publishing (UK). I think you will enjoy the stories.

One morning while grandfather was out walking, a big raven flew down and lit in front of him, stopping him in his tracks. “Kaaaaaa! ” the raven said. Then,...

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Pavlov's man was my friend. We worked together for several years in an office in Seattle, Washington. In fact, we started there on the same day. He got a big corner office, and I got the office next door. His office came equipped with a large saltwater fish tank in which there were four or five fish. I only recall four of them: Pavlov, a spiny box puffer named Yoda, a small, gray, nondescript fish, and a small red-and-bl...

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I've written and published poetry for years. This is one that came to me shortly after waking up this morning. I've worked on it all day. It was inspired by a song from "Playing for Change" entitled "Don't you worry about a thing". It played in my head all night, and this morning "Celebration" was born. Enjoy.

Grandfather and the Deer

 

One

 

 

          One morning when grandfather and grandmother were visiting his younger brother on the family farm, grandfather looked out the window and said:

          “Look, broth...

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I love to write; I don't always enjoy editing. Writing is creative and fun; editing too often seems like work. It's a matter of you we look at it.

I remember seeing my mother standing in front of her easel with a paintbrush poised, thinking. She'd add a bit of color here, remove something there, change something else. Finally satisfied, she would pronounce the painting finished. To her, "editing" was a part of the creative process. Most of the time I view it the same way. But it isn't always "...
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Call it writer's block or hitting a roadblock, getting there happens to all writers. It happened to me three or four days ago after sailing along smoothly in my novel about Tokyo artist Seiji. Reaching a scene change, I was stuck, up-to-the-hubcaps in mud, dead battery dead. Stared at the blank space and couldn't think of a thing. Nada.

Then this morning I made a startlingly simple discovery: I was trying to remember something I had deleted ... a bit of scenery from the new chapter, but it wou...
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Parking

New writing projects pop into my head fairly often, especially when my brain is in “create” mode. I may be riding along on the subway, eating, talking with my wife or a friend, just waking up (happened this morning), overhear someone talking, or have an idea or image nag away at me until I do something about it. If any of the ideas begi...

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Last year I wrote a short story about a fictional Tokyo artist named Seiji Matsuda. The story finished and published ("A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories", edited by Mohammad A. Quayum), I turned to other writing projects. Seiji, however, wasn't through with me. So I set the other projects aside and began working on expanding his story into a novel about his life. It is now about half finished, and what a challenge it has been.

A short story is one thing; a novel is something else again....
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Writing, for me, is a love affair. Rewriting is what makes the love affair with a writing project blossom. To a painter, rewriting is like looking at a painting and adding a bit of color here, additional brush strokes there, sometimes adding something in ... or removing something that doesn't fit. I saw my mother, who was a painter, standing in front of her easel with a brush in one hand, looking at the painting she was working on, making the necessary changes.

But rewriting isn't always fun. ...
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For me, the characters are what create stories, plots appear as the story moves along. I know that's backwards for many writers, and I know I'm not the only one who writes the way I do. Teresa Geering, author of the popular The Eye of Erasmus writes the way I do, beginning with character.

If I lose sight of the character (who he or she is), then I lose sight of the story, and it stops. I've recently had that experience and had to take a break from the story until I caught a clear vision of who...
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What struck me most reading George Polley’s books, Grandfather and the Raven and The Old Man and the Monkey are their ability to relocate the reader geographically without dislocating him culturally or intellectually. The place is maybe Japan but the moral of the stories are to be applied everywhere, and on everyone.

My children read both books and enjoyed them immensely. They appreciated the sense of adventure, readability and the uniqueness of the style. I appreciated their subtle moral...

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I wrote this poem after having watched the salesman on the news one evening. His presentation still sends chills running up and down my spine. Ramzy Baroud, the editor of The Palestine Chronicle kindly published it in the September 15th 2010 issue of his online newspaper. The poem is reprinted below in its original format, with the last two stanzas revised.

The Salesman

A manufacturer's rep at a cluster bomb trade show
explains on camera how these weapons are designed
to avoid civilian targets an...
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Okay, so I'm an old fogey, a lover of books made of paper that I can hold in my hand. But I'm not a died-in-the-wool fogey of the fossil variety, I'm open-minded enough to learn what a huge presence e-books are becoming, and that people do read books on their iPhones.

If you've been on my home page, you've already learned that all of my books are available as e-books, and that two of them --"The Old Man and the Monkey" and "Grandfather and the Raven" are available in paperback editions. This k...
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If you've been reading my blog, you know I attach a lot of importance to characters and character development to telling a good story. Click on the following link to read a wonderful article by MG Harris, author of the acclaimed series "The Joshua Files". If you're a writer, you'll want this one for your library.

http://www.mgharris.net/2010/04/24/motivating-your-characters-the-key-to-success-zero-moment-blog-tour-7/

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... it will replenish itself if you relax and don't panic.

I recently hit a "flat" place while working on chapter 5 in my novel about Seiji, the Asakusa Tokyo artist. He had just arrived in Princeton, New Jersey to visit old friends David and Noriko Sakamoto, and I got stuck. I felt tired,deleted, and wanted nothing so much as to go to sleep.

"Hmmm," I said; "wonder if we're both suffering a little jet lag and culture shock?" We were (at least I was, culture shock that is). He'd never visited t...
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I have several books that I keep by my desk; these are my "working" books, books I dip into for pleasure and inspiration as I write. Freya Manfred's poetry collection Swimming With a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle is one of them. Each time I pick it up, I find something new, some new depth of vision that I had missed before that makes me sit back and wonder "How did I not see this? How could I possibly have missed it?"

What is exciting about this slim volume of poems is that each time I visi...
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Where do stories, poems and novels come from? Do they come from an outline and a plan? Sometimes, and for some writers, most or all of the time. When you begin a project, should you stay with it (a novel, say) before moving on to something else? Again, this seems to depend on the writer and the way his or her imagination works. Haruki Murakami, for instance, shifts from writing a novel to writing short stories to writing another novel, then back again.

For me the process is somewhat diffe...

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It's often called "writer's block" -- you know, when you're sitting there in front of a blank screen or sheet of paper and your mind is blank ... for days. I call it "when the well runs dry,. because that's the way it feels. I've used too much of the "water" in it, it's dry, and I have to wait until the spring replenishes it before I can write again. It's a wake up call for me to sit back, relax, and let the well replenish, which it always does.

This happens to all writers. I use it to relax, ...
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No, this isn't a travel article, it's about the few months I spent in Mexico City in 1973-74 and how I was captivated by the city. It's also the title of a poem that I wrote for my son Michael back in 1974 that was published in the magazine "Valley Views, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio later that year, about which a friend recently said "You really fell in love with Mexico City, didn't you?" Oh boy, did I ever! I am now in the middle of writing a novel about it, called "The City Has Many Faces". But ...
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As I said in a previous post, I came to writing poetry mostly by accident, when a key flew off my typewriter in the midst of a writing project. For most writing, I am typing-dependent,which meant that I pushed the project I was working on aside and wrote the following poem after coming in from a walk in my Minneapolis neighborhood.

A Song

to be sung softly in the morning or before going

to bed, to the accompaniment of a flute and an

ancient stringed instrument.

Night-coming son

moon r...

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Listening to stories is something we learn as children. To a writer, listening is vital, because stories are are everywhere, free for the taking when we take the time to listen for and to them.

It's amazing to me what I've learned over the years by listening, asking clarifying questions when appropriate, and allowing the person to tell his or her story as I sit and listen. Some years ago I wrote and published “Requiem for Blue”, a story about an ex-convict who had spent 30 years in priso...

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A simple answer is that I find them everywhere: birds, monkeys, people I meet, communities and even huge cities which, at first glance, seems impossible but in my experience, isn't. To me, “character” has first to do with meeting, then seeing the whole. One definition of character is: “The inherent complex of attributes that determine a persons moral and ethical actions and reactions” (source: WordWeb thesaurus/dictionary), which is what happens when you really get to know someone, w...

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This morning I received the following quotation in an email from Don Hill, an acquaintance in the UK. Here it is, by British storyteller Anthony Nason. 

"The storyteller who wants to make a difference faces the challenge to make their own journey of transformation. Through travelling the otherworld of stories, experiencing other cultures, places, creatures, and seeking sources of wisdom beyond their own ego, they may serve, in some ways like a shaman, as a bridge for their audiences between...
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“Words are a writer’s power tools,” says Welsh novelist Mari Strachan, “and it’s crucial to be able to use them effectively.” I couldn't possibly agree more.

When I read I have always paid attention to words – the way they sound, the way they're strung together in lines, phrases and sentences, their emotion and the images and emotions they arouse. Here is an example, from Sherman Alexie's fine novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: “My dad was trying to comfo...

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Why compassion? It boils down to this: Without compassion writing, like all human communication, devolves into dismissiveness, attack and put-down, all of which are disconnecting, and ultimately dehumanizing. I do not like writing that treats human beings and the world they live in, as things to be manipulated, played with and destroyed. Psychologically speaking, a person who does that is called a sociopath, a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of m...

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I recently ran across a quote that perfectly describes my experience with writing short stories and working on a novel, both of which I am doing. The quote is from novelist and short story writer Haruki Murakami, and is in the Introduction to the English edition of his short story collection "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman".

"To put it in the simplest possible terms," he writes, "I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing  novels is like planting a forest, then wr...
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When a friend asked me the other day what role humility plays in creating art, I responded that I think it plays an important role. But when I looked the word up in several dictionaries, I found the definitions less than satisfying: “The defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.” Others are: “Modesty, lacking pretense, not believing that you are superior to others,” and “Shifting...

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When I write a poem, it is a way of seeing and distilling what I see in the simplest, clearest and most expressive way possible. When I write a story or a novel, I can be as expansive as I want, but when I write a poem, I try to boil it all down. Not all poets do that. Nikos Kazantzakis, the great Greek-Cretan novelist and poet, wrote "The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel" in the form of a poem, 824 pages long! The language and imagery are incredibly rich. I recall reading it nearly forty years ago a...
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I never thought of myself as a poet, and stumbled onto writing it by accident in 1973 when my typewriter broke right in the middle of a short story I was writing. Being in a writing mood, I began writing poetry and discovered the beauty of it in the rhythm and music of language and imagery. Here's one of the poems that I wrote, which was fist published in 1974 to advertise a reading I was giving.

Spring Poem

This morning walking
to work
                       I saw
leaves
backing out of the
branches...
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The simplest answer is to begin and never stop, because it's in writing that we develop our skills. The problem with many "wannabees" is quitting the minute discouragement arrives, and just like the next hour and the next day, it will arrive.

What's the best way to guard against being defeated by discouragement? Read books by great writers. And read about them. In the early days, I read everything I could lay my hands on about well-known writers and their experience. I bought every single issu...
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Kokopelli has always been one of my favorite images. He celebrates, he dances, he is playful, and he gets me to seeing and exploring things I wouldn't ordinarily see and explore. Whenever I hear his whistle, I've learned to follow it.

This image is from a painting by my good friend Paul Bauck, and I treasure it. Paul was kind enough to gift me with a digital image of it before we left Seattle for Sapporo, Japan a little less than a year ago.



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This ahuehuete tree is one of my "muses". It represents great age (it is over 1,000 years old), myth, shamanic reality, struggle, history, creation itself. The first time I saw it, I was stopped in my tracks, stunned by its immense size, looking like a mountain in an ancient Chinese painting. The Aztec king, Moctezuma (misspelled "Montezuma" in American English) played at its feet when he was a boy. Ahuehuete trees (Mexican cypress) grow to immense size and age. The one in Tulun, in the squar...
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This is where I talk about writing, how I do it, where I get my ideas, what inspires me, why I write, and who my favorite writers and poets are. I post whenever I have something I want to write about, so sometimes you may find a whole string of posts, and sometimes you won't find anything for a week or more. Feel free to leave comments and ask for a response; I do respond, especially to people who are new at this writing craft. It takes time and patience, so keep at it. Believe me, it's the o...
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