Tag Archives: writing

June 26, 2012 · 4:19 am

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Climbing the Mesa

Hey folks —

There’s a new story up on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.

Southern California writer David Chittenden contributes “Climbing the Mesa.” Cool piece.

You can also read the story Huffington Post recently used,which I posted to TYTT a few months ago.

My First Bank Robbery is by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter about his, you guessed it, first bank robbery.

Again, I’m always interested in submissions to the site. I do edit, don’t pay, and love good true stories. So get writing and send one in….

 

 

 

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June 7, 2012 · 6:47 am

WRITING: Ray Bradbury, an appreciation

There’s a great appreciation of Ray Bradbury, who died yesterday at 91, by Scott Timberg in Zocalo.

In it, among other things, Timberg wonders why it was California where science fiction writers flourished. He concludes that it was because there was no literary elite or hierarchy to disapprove of the genre.

Reminds me of Tijuana in the 1950s through the 1980s, where lots of poor people could join the middle class because there was no wealthy class controlling opportunity as there was in the long-established cities of Mexico’s interior.

Timberg sees a California vibe in Bradbury’s stories about Martians, and notes the author was a young autograph hound, with no college education, who wrote his first stuff on butcher paper, and Fahrenheit 451 on a UCLA library typewriter into which he had to keep pumping dimes.

“Libraries raised me,” Bradbury is quoted as saying. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.”

Timberg writes the MisreadCity blog.

 

 

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May 30, 2012 · 6:11 pm

STORYTELLING: C.M. Mayo’s blog

One thing I’ve learned is that you can always count on something hip at the blog written by C.M. Mayo.

Here, she talks about writing an essay on the legends surrounding Maximilian, the Austrian emperor that Mexico imported to rule it for a few years in the 1800s — which has to be itself one of the weirdest chapters in the history of any country.

Then they set him before a firing squad and that was that. Except that his body was embalmed and put on display for a while. His wife, Carlotta, died many decades later.

I’m hoping C.M. writes that essay, since in the duel between legend and fact, legend is usually more interesting. In another life, she was an economist who wrote a lot about informal methods of savings/finance. Now she does other stuff.

Meanwhile, check out the C.M. Mayo blog.

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