Prose

In addition to my poems, lately I've been exploring the prose world.  "Revisiting it" may be a better description of this.  In 1979, I wrote for a while for a suburban Indianapolis newspaper and then tried my luck as a freelance magazine writer (which went nowhere).  While I was a university professor, I authored numerous scholarly articles and convention papers.  It's fair to say that I have been a writer for a long time, just in ways that were more career-supportive than as an end in themselves.  It's what's made the composition of poetry so exhilarating for me.  But I sometimes miss writing more (ahem) prosaically.  Here are a couple of projects I'm assembling to take some of the edge off that yearning :

Project 1:  Based on information I've run across while conducting a family genealogy, I'm assembling a m.s. of some of the more compelling stories.  The working title at this point is Finding Minton.  It details my quest to gather information on a hitherto-unknown great-uncle of mine, whose adult life was spent in a mental institution.  As to why, well, there's the story.

Project 2:  As an extension of my blogging over the years, coupled with my experience in writing conference papers and the like, the idea of the personal essay has always had a lot of appeal.  I'm looking at some of my posts to see if anything can be lifted and molded into a series of humorous takes on various events.

It isn't prose, but I also have a chapbook under construction based on poems I've been composing over the past couple of years, and an idea (just that, for now) for a second full-length book of poems.  More as I get a better view of these.

This page last updated April 17, 2008