Last one of the year! Has 2025 seemed to anyone else like it lasted 1,000 years? Anne of Green Gables fans have been queering the title character’s passionate friendship with bestie Diana for a long time, but do you know about her genderqueer son Walter? In this essay at the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s CBC Arts
December Links Roundup: Trans of Green Gables Read More »
The theme this month is that there is no theme. My fellow midlife transitioner, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, has written an excellent new book with the waggish title of DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Penguin Random House, 2025) Part memoir-in-essays and part cultural criticism, DILF covers the fraught but inseparable relationship between transmasculine people and feminist
November Links Roundup: DILFs, Zombies, and Lot’s Wife Read More »
It is I, your favorite obscure novelist, here to share with you the good, the bad, the immeasurable, and the pleasurable results of a year of marketing my second novel, Origin Story. Which, by the way, makes a great Christmas or Hanukkah gift for an emo homosexual, comic book fan, theology nerd, or person who
Tips from a Year of Indie Book Marketing Read More »
Happy Pride Month! Or, if you prefer one of the other so-called deadly sins, how about Rainbow Sloth Month? “Diversity leads to resilience, and it is the reason we, and every other living thing on the planet exist,” says Ames Reeder at the Sloth Conservation Foundation. At the ecology-minded literary journal Terrain, Ana Maria Spagna’s
June Links Roundup: Speaking for the Trees Read More »
I love horror. Not gore, so much, but the creepy stuff. Give me dark family psychology (gee I wonder why), cursed objects from dusty archives, the uncanny blankness of our modern built environment and the soulless things lurking beneath its plastic surfaces. Lately I’m especially drawn to historical atrocities with a supernatural twist, a sub-genre
Spooktober Reading Roundup Read More »
Winning Writers subscriber Helen Leslie Sokolsky has just released a new poetry collection, When We Had Orchards When We Had Moonbeams. I favorably reviewed her earlier book Two Sides of a Ticket on this blog a few years ago. Helen has kindly allowed me to share a poem from her new book below. She says,
Helen Leslie Sokolsky: “In the Company of Books” Read More »
Last month I had the pleasure of co-hosting a Zoom book talk with Canadian novelist Jessica Pegis, “Divine Non-Duality and the Queer Body”. We read excerpts from my gay male coming-of-age novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016) and her new book The God Painter (Stone Table Books, 2021) and explored their common themes of
New Reviews for “Made Man” and a “Two Natures” Book Talk Video Read More »
Suzanne Ondrus is a poet and literary scholar whose work explores cultural exchange and understanding, intimacy, oppression, and history. Her poetry book Passion Seeds, about love and longing long distance between an American woman and a Burkina Faso man, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Prize from Little Red Tree Publishing. Suzanne has taught writing and
Two Poems from Suzanne Ondrus’s “Passion Seeds” Read More »
Barbara Regenspan is a poet, scholar, and opinion writer who has taught leadership in social justice-focused education at Colgate University. Her books include Haunting and the Educational Imagination. Now, her debut full-length poetry collection, The Chessmaster’s Daughter, is available from Cayuga Lake Books. This collection combines lyricism and philosophical inquiry, meditating on the tensions between appreciation
Two Poems from “The Chessmaster’s Daughter” by Barbara Regenspan Read More »
Since April is National Poetry Month, it seemed like a good time to run excerpts from some poetry collections I’ve recently enjoyed. Mahnaz Badihian is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and visual artist in San Francisco. She sent me a copy of her new poetry book, Ask the Wind (Vagabond Books), to review for Winning Writers.
April Is Poetry Month: Two Poems from Mahnaz Badihian’s “Ask the Wind” Read More »