My Amazon book Overone contains my collected fiction.

One: Literature has only one theme: Death. Two: Teach in such a way that no one can object. Three: A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown. Even if you did not pay attention in class because you were a distracted artist, you learned the markers, such as these, that would come to define your place in the world. They gave you pause, and they made you think. They defined you.

In addition, you paid attention to the greats in your field. In my case, I cannot forget the names Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Miguel de Unamuno. I made a serious study of modern philosophy. When someone in the current day says, ‘existential crisis,’ I honestly do not know what they mean. I am here; I am a human being; this is me. Your doctrine wants to marginalize me. I am proving your doctrine wrong by who I am and the way I am and how I live. Thank you, but I live well—if not so well on a given day, I have a nice cup of coffee and a gluten free fried doughnut, and I mostly get over it.

I must reject large parts of your doctrine because it is wrong. That is existential—take life the way it is at first, from the start, before anything else—and there might be some kind of life-crisis attached to it. Is that what other people mean, a pitched battle of wills? It does not seem so, given the context, most of the time.

From sentence to sentence, scene to scene, I believe I write compelling fiction. You can probably place my work somewhere at the high-end of literary fiction. It is not zany, madcap fiction to be sure. If my characters are gay, as they might be, they are not having an identity crisis: They are out there living the hell out of life and asking very, very big questions.

In the vast literature of the world, only two writers have touched my soul: Plato and William Shakespeare. Plato did the maieutic bumpkin routine with Socrates, like: ‘I am not an expert on that subject, but let us explore that together and see where it takes us.’ These probes into the thought world ended up informing lives, with ideas we still cannot get out of our heads—thank God the dialogues have been preserved through the ages, mostly by monkish scribes, it seems.

When, in college, I read the Apology of Socrates, I was moved as never before. I ended up thinking this: Democracy was a new experiment for the Greeks. They elected a senate. The people gave the senators representative power. They, the senators, decided that Socrates did not respect the gods enough and made him drink poison hemlock. Why the hell did the people let them do that?

Shakespeare’s fool in King Lear has always defined for me the art and the craft of writing. Let the character tease the high and mighty. Have him murdered. Let that tragedy become one of the most heartfelt moments in literature. Enjoy the comic relief. Let him have his glorious moments on the stage—and feel the pain. If, in this work, I have got halfway there, I am pleased. If I have got all the way there—well—I promise to be gentle when I touch your soul.

I broke through as a writer with the long story, not quite novella length, Licentious People. Quite a few people have asked me about the meaning of licentious in my title. My characters give each other the license to be themselves and to challenge conventional thinking. It is a twist on the normal meaning, referring to a person who takes moral license and acts badly in the world.

Overone is a movie script, which I have made as readable as possible. Forgive me if it is a bit challenging for the general reader; however, line for line, scene for scene, big idea for big idea, I believe it is a fun read, if a little startling in where it ends up—no spoiler here!

A Dream of Eschaton is about someone who grows up to be a great stage actor and movie star. The narrator is his life partner, his male lover. The main character grows up well nurtured in the penthouse of a prominent hotel in Vancouver. He and his sister are enthralled by literature and art. Their youthful visions tell us what it means to live and to love—and get there.

Lieutenant Lasset—can I say this? —is a Columbo episode, I did not pursue permissions, so I changed the inspector’s name. I leave the ending a bit sketchy because I do not understand the nuclear weapons science that must be part of the story. I abandoned the story for something like eighteen years precisely because I did not understand the science of nuclear weapons. If it is made into a feature film or a television movie, others, with solid knowledge of the science, must provide accurate details. It is not a secret to me that my work is widely read out on the internet. I think the television series Lost was based on the plane accident I describe in great detail as occurring at the edge of Lake Michigan, at Sleeping Bear Dunes, on Leelanau Peninsula, not too far from Traverse City. I also see similarities between my Japanese pop music segment, in that story, set at a fictional restaurant on Route M 22 and a movie that I truly respect, Lost in Translation. I am not going to sue anyone. I don’t care. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation. However, it wouldn’t hurt if I were given some credit for my work and my efforts at creating filmic ideas.

Ragamuffin Days is a pocket story, a very short story, I wrote for a National Public Radio pocket story contest some years ago.

Knotty Pine takes its setting from the home of my Aunt Martina; she and her husband owned a converted mill on a river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is about childhood best friends.

The Last Aesthete tells the story of a woman discovering her place in world. She is involved in the arts during her college years; later, she discovers her gift for etymology—the meaning of words. She becomes an expert at some tricky forms of Anglo-Saxon verbs. She and her female partner live in a home built on the back forty (forty acres in the middle of a country square mile) of the family’s ancestral property.

Running Lines is a little ditty about how creativity works in the minds of an eleven-year-old and his middle-aged uncle when they meet by chance in the parking lot of a warehouse store. If I were more ambitious, I would make it work as my own Waiting for Godot.

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