My parents were storytellers. One of my father’s favorite tall tales was about a character named Dicey. He could not resist stories of Dicey. If the fish were not biting, he claimed the creature – part dog, part boy – came out of the water and followed him home saying, “Wait for Dicey, wait for… Continue Reading
Identity Formations, Part Two
In Who Can Know the Heart, Henry adopts an alternate identity that he wears like a suit of armor. Henry as Wizard acts like everything is illusion, the world obscured, everyone doubled, split. A consequence of the back-story: the reckless acquisition of mineral rights for the burgeoning steel industry, Wizard tells riddle-like prophetic tales from… Continue Reading
The Theater of Identity
The ambiguous project of telling a story of oneself is slippery and often revealed only in what is left behind or unsaid. Although my parents had little formal education, learning was valued in our home. My father read the newspaper from cover to cover everyday, and my mother taught Sunday school and studied her lesson… Continue Reading
Exposing the Unquiet Self
When is an identity-marking act activism? Long distance running that is both flight and fight may be such an act, for flight instincts never preclude defiance. Every run isn’t away from a fight; some are toward one. Embracing a fight against status quo interests and flight toward a life not defined by the usual social… Continue Reading
Curiosity and Identity
Curiosity that leads to looking for secrets lies at the crossroads of sameness and difference – desire to imagine we are all the same yet seduced by the possibility we are different. Imagining other ways of being offers the opportunity to disrupt the idea of us/them. What is outside is seldom the same as what… Continue Reading
Identity Formations in Who Can Know the Heart
In the Books and Writers group in which I participate, someone asked about ideas for characters. I wrote back that mine usually just seemed to appear on the page. That was mostly true, but the conversation caused me to remember that initially the inspiration for the primary characters in the current manuscript occurred years ago… Continue Reading
Most of us live in the gray areas… (Between the Masks, 1998)
When developing a character, I mine the dark places in my psyche to shine a flashlight into unlit corners. For we are seldom simply who we are; we are who we think we are, who we tell others we are, who we tell ourselves we are, and more. Our identities seem to reside in the… Continue Reading
Identity Matters
For twenty-five years I ran long distance, but until I left my university post, I never realized how much of that running had been about running away. My characters tend to run long distance as well, figuratively speaking at least, and they too learn that running away is not the same as being free. In… Continue Reading
Undercurrents 
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