So it goes...

Thursday mornings have become my favorite morning of the week. Much like Saturday mornings with my wife, Thursdays start with coffee and conversation at a local coffee shop. Unlike Saturdays these are spent at Cafe De Arts in downtown Waukesha, home of the best cup of coffee in Waukesha, in my opinion. The owner Ayhun is a wonderful proprietor and always has my coffee ready by the time I get to the register. "I saw you coming," he says. He is also the one who offered his place for my book signing on June 21st, completely catching me off guard. I like to support businesses like his because he really cares about his customers and has a heart for his community as shown through his suspended coffees program. (A sort of pay it forward coffee program for the homeless.) Anyways, I meet between three and four other men there on Thursday mornings before work every week. Occupationally, we are a diverse lot. There's a metal worker, an engineer who works for GE, a youth pastor...

April is  National Poetry Month . In recognition of it, I would like to feature local Southeastern Wisconsin poets by posting poems throughout the month. If you know of any poets from the Milwaukee Metro area, mention it to them and have them send me some poems, a short bio, and a website/blog address if they have one. I will try and fill in the blanks with my own work or other favorites. Another poem from Mario Medina , who I featured yesterday. Painter of Dead Things                                                        by Mario Medina I'm that Uncle of yours that tells you that Santa Claus isn't real. Until proven otherwise when you find that fat man in his red suit robbing your home. Blogging off...

April is National Poetry Month . In recognition of it, I would like to feature local Southeastern Wisconsin poets by posting poems throughout the month. If you know of any poets from the Milwaukee Metro area, mention it to them and have them send me between 1 and 5 poems, a short bio, and a website/blog address if they have one. I will try and fill in the blanks with my own work or other favorite famous poets. Note that I will still have my traditional blog postings on Thursdays and Sundays, as always. Installment 1 comes from my writing colleague and musician Mario Medina . Mario was one of the first poets I heard at AllWriters' Workplace and Workshop and was the inspiration for me to start writing poetry in the first place - (Thanks for the burden of that, Mario. Ha!) He calls himself a deconstructionist and his poetry is what I would call dark-realism and screams for an idealistic society that might never be found. I admire his work and I hope you do too. He has two chapbook...

With the release of Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir a mere 79 days away, I thought I'd give some sneak peeks at some of the characters in the book. I won't go into much situational detail as far as what is in the book, I'll leave that for you to read when it comes out, but rather I'll try to outline the role they played in my life and how it relates to them helping shape the book. Because the story starts out with a section on friends, I'll talk a little bit about a friend of mine named Pat. Growing up, Pat was probably my best friend. Oh I had other very close friends, but Pat and I were just a bit tighter. He has a wicked sense of humor and I always gravitated to him for that reason. We were also both over 6'4", skinny and never good enough at sports to be a starter or on the varsity. We had similar musical tastes - at the time it was Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, The Cars, and of course our mutual favorite George Thorogood. W...

We were joking in writing class last night about how Facebook posts seemed to have dropped off lately. I even went as far as to jokingly say "Facebook is no fun anymore." Most people laughed because they all know it's not true. Facebook, while not for everyone, is alive and well. I think that there are slow, low post periods and heavy posting spells as well. Furthermore, I don't think Facebook is doing itself any favors by changing their interface every 6 months, to say nothing of the constant fiddling with security settings. I suspect it will only be a matter of time before we're typing into a small little box and 3/4 of the screen is ads. In my dealings with Facebook, Twitter and my blog over the past few days, I came to realize the breadth of different people I've met because of social media in one form or another. Blog Perhaps the most recent contact was with a friend from across the street when I was in high school. This guy had seen my brother on T...

My fifteen year-old son starts his Drivers Training this week. He has to take three weeks of classes at two hours a class. Then he needs 20 hours of behind the wheel (10 BTW and 10 observing). This is both an exciting and frightening time for me. While I am excited that he will soon be able to drive himself to see his friends and to various social events, I have to confess I'm a bit terrified at having to train him. I guess I did it with Sarah, so I can do it for him, but that doesn't make me want to. I'll never forget the first time I took Sarah out driving in the abandoned WalMart parking lot. We pretty much went in circles for a half an hour and things were fairly calm. There was that one moment however when I told her to turn left and she took that to mean "turn kinda lazily to the left...whenever you want, no big hurry..." To further endanger the two of us, she hadn't really dropped her speed during the non-turn, the lackadaisical turn, the roundabout...

My first accepted fiction piece is finally online. Phantom Camp is a story about a Zombie Sasquatch which just about says it all right there. The whole tale of the tale is weird, how it came about, why I chose to write about it, what inspired it, etc. I've talked about it before, but what inspired it was my son reading the Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead  while we were camping in the BWCA in 2012. I asked my nephew what he thought about a Zombie Sasquatch story. He thought it was a great idea, and I figured with zombies being all the rage, that it was a safe bet. So, when I got home I wrote it. This was a stretch for me for a couple of reasons. First of all, fiction isn't my first love. I write nonfiction. Secondly, I don't write horror. About all I had going for me was a love for camping and the BWCA. But I wrote it, nonetheless. It was fun, but I have to confess, I actually creeped myself out a few times while writing it. I do...