Prose
Stories from The New Yorker and other magazines and a few lectures
Stories from The New Yorker and other magazines and a few lectures
When a man lives in one place for most of his life, he doesn’t need GPS. He is guided by memories of boyhood bike rides, the ever present Mississippi, and the undeniable power of rhubarb. Click above to read the full article.
Read MoreTwenty-five years ago, for amusement, I invented a small town where the women are strong and the men good-looking and all the children above average and started telling stories about it on the radio, and ever since then people have asked me if it’s a real town, and if it is, then where is it exactly?
Read MoreDenmark is a little land of five and a quarter million souls, most of them Andersens, Hansens, Jensens, or Petersens, with a few Madsens Jacobsens, and Mortensens and Rasmussens thrown in for variety, who live on a pleasant green peninsula and two large islands and many tiny ones north of Germany, between the North Sea and the Baltic, a major supplier of ham and cheese and ceramics, a nation of irreligious Lutherans, a democratic society prickly to wealth and privilege and the home of a royal line that goes back to A.D. 935.
Read MoreThe state fair is a ritual carnival marking the end of summer and gardens and apple orchards and the start of school and higher algebra and the imposition of strict rules and what we in the north call the Long Dark Time. Like gardening, the fair doesn’t change all that much.
Read MoreALL OF MY BOOKS, including Wagons Westward!!! Hiiiii-YAW and Ck-ck Giddup Beauty! C’mon Big Girl, Awaaaaayy! and Pa! Look Out! It’s—Aiiiiieee!, have been difficult for my readers, I guess, judging from their reactions when they see me shopping at Val-Mar or sitting in the Quad County Library & Media Center. After a rough morning at […]
Read MoreMore memoirs have been written on the theme Me and the New Yorker than about the Spanish-American War or homesteading in Nebraska or train trips down South America way, which is a tribute to its legendary editors Harold Ross and William Shawn and also to the rich self-consciousness of some of their writers. Mr. Shawn […]
Read More(Back when I was 24, I pitched up at Time-Life Inc. in its 48-story box headquarters on Sixth Avenue & 50th Street, one more desperate job applicant, and was directed to Sports Illustrated where a kindly woman named Honor Fitzpatrick looked at my writing samples and gently discouraged me. “Your talent is for fiction,” she […]
Read More(Written for The New Yorker, this story inspired the radio serial “Lives of the Cowboys” on A Prairie Home Companon, with Dusty and Lefty, Lefty’s lost love Evelyn Beebalo, and the villain Big Messer, which takes place in and around Yellow Gulch, Wyoming. It’s Samuel Beckett for 14-year-olds. The cowboys suffer extreme loneliness which drives […]
Read MoreCollege is a time in your life when you can be gloriously ridiculously full of yourself and get away with it, a luxury once reserved for the aristocracy but, in America, extended to the child of a carpenter and postal worker, namely me. I was a middle-class kid from the West River Road where late […]
Read MoreWelcome to the Authors Guild gala. I come from the big flat place out west of here where there are many authors and they are sorry they couldn’t be here but the corn was not in yet and the hogs had the measles and needed to be inoculated. Everyone has a gala now, the Salvation […]
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