The Trusty Old Collection
Silent Retreats
Silent Retreats

This volume of eleven stories, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, contains “Arcola Girls,” which first appeared in the New England Review, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and also won a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

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Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball
Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball

In the 2004, I received the handoff of a project the great story writer and anthologist John McNally had begun. It was a book of essays by writers that centered on baseball. The idea of the book was not actually “sportswriting.” It was to collect a set of essays by writers that showed how baseball had played a part in their lives.

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How Men Pray
How Men Pray

This, my first volume of poetry, published by the wondrous Anhinga Press, appeared in the winter of 2005. Two of the poems within, “The Worrier’s Guild” and “Flying,” have been read by Garrison Keillor on Writer’s Almanac.

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“Healing,” the long-awaited Bali story, and Keillor

Over the last six months, I’ve been writing a long short story called “Healing,” a project that came from my trip a year ago to the Indonesian island of Bali.  The story, as usual, went a different direction than I expected.  I resurrected Jerome Slater, an oil painter, who first appeared in an unpublished novel, [...]

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Argentina and the Southern Cross

We arrived in Argentina June 21, a few hours after it turned winter there. While Bali is about 10 degrees south of the equator, Buenos Aires is 35 degrees south. One evening in San Antonio de Areco, where the gaucho picture above was taken (there were festivities going on and I was putting the dodge [...]

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