The ancient bird

We were in the midst of one of those late winter storms that Minnesota has when I saw him. It was one of those storms that dumps heavy, wet snow and blows it around in blasts of icy needles that sting your face and takes your breath away. As I stepped out through the door of the hospital where I work, the wind lunged at me, and I set off running for the bus shelter with one hand on my hat and the other gripping my briefcase. My face burned from the cold. Behind me the big fl...

I just finished my novel "Bear: The Story of a Boy and His Very Unusual Dog" this afternoon, and sent it off to Taylor Street Publishing. 

Who is Bear? Bear is a brown dog that looks exactly like a brown bear. He also acts a lot like one. He's a great companion, listens well (unlike most dogs who will go to sleep soon after a human begins to talk), and has a roar that is the most chillingly terrifying, zombie-monster roar anyone ever heard. He only uses this roar when it's absolutely necessar...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...