Last Chance

Books,

Tomorrow morning at 9am I’ll begin an eight-hour write-a-thon to help raise funds for San Diego Writers, Ink, a literary nonprofit. So far I’ve reached 2/3 of my goal. I’m going to match all donations up to $1,000. Whatever that number is tomorrow morning I’m going to match. I really hope it’s $1,000. What’s in it for you? I’m offering a specially designed hand-printed t-shirt to anyone who donates $40 or more and helps me reach my goal. This is a one-time deal. I’m not going to make any more of these shirts. It’s corny to say “last chance.” I got a flat tire in Last Chance Pass in Death Valley and I’m still here. But this really is your last chance. That’s not a threat. I’m just saying.

Re-blog por favor.

A Not-So-Great Day at Sea

Books

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I reviewed Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea for the Los Angeles Times: 

Dyer is an odd choice for the job. He’s written more than a dozen books, but there’s little in his wide-ranging works of novelistic music criticism, meta analyses of film and literature, and novels of eroticism and wanderlust to suggest the English author is up for immersing himself in the U.S. Navy’s rich tradition of nautical nomenclature and affinity for highly specific jargon, or as Dyer puts it, an “Acronym Intensive Environment.”

Last of the Code Talkers

Books

Chester Nez passed away today. He was the last of the original 29 Navajo code talkers. I first learned about the code talkers while I was a student at Northern Arizona University and had the privilege of visiting the code talker memorial at Window Rock, capitol of the Navajo Nation with a former student Erik Bitsui. The irony here is that Nez, like most Navajo boys of his generation, was sent to a government run boarding school where he was forbidden from speaking Navajo.

How I Learned to Love BEA

Books, , ,

A recap of BEA 2014 and a look back at a very dark time.

In 2008, I was working on an Indian reservation 30 miles east of downtown San Diego at a casino somewhere between the desert and the mountains. Along with my outsider angst, I was nurturing an addiction to alcohol that I would exacerbate by abusing other substances. Driving out to the rez every day to create copy like “ALL-YOU-CAN EAT CRAB LEGS $11.99,” I still had dreams of being a real writer, but drinking airplane bottles of vodka on my lunch break in the casino parking lot on the rez, I could feel those dreams slipping away.