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...

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This post began as a longer article, published in SWI (Speak Without Interruption), on August 21, 2009. It is a testimony to the persistence of some of us, who simply do not quit.

Saburo Toyoda was born in Japan in 1908. He has been a painter since childhood. Graduating from high school, he went from his small village to the big city to follow an art career, but no one liked his paintings, so  he became a junior high school teacher and continued his painting on the side, marrying and raising f...
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Over the pasts few years I've read a lot of good novel, and a few great ones. Two novels that I've found truly memorable are Garth Stein's marvellous "The Art of Racing in The Rain" and Lizzie Eldridge's "Duende". 

I'll begin with "The Art of Racing in The Rain". Had Kathleen McKenna not recommended it ("insisted" fits better), I would never have known about it, and had I known about it, I wouldn't have read it. Auto racing is nowhere even close to something that interests me. But this novel a...
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The most valuable thing I’ve learned about writing about a character is to listen to what the character has to tell me. In my first published story (“Jonah’s Birth”, The North Dakota Review, Autumn 1971) I let Jonah lead me where he wanted to go after being vomited up by the whale. It’s a technique I learned in my years as a mental health counselor: Ask people why they are there, then listen as they tell me their story. When I do that, everything falls together; when I don’t, it d...

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A late September day

The sun is out

On the veranda

my wife hangs laundry

In the distance

thunder.

-- 28 September

 

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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...

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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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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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“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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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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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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This is a story about Grandfather and a deer that predates Grandfather's meeting Sir Raven, his big raven friend. Set on the farm of Grandfather's brother, it is a poignant story of compassion and recovery.

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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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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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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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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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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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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