A fellow of the New Surrealist Institute, Lee is his name, lives in the Denver area and is deeply affected by the shooting that took place at a movie theater in Aurora.  While he mentioned that no one near or dear to him was in the movie theater at the time, I do recall him mentioning on the NSI website that friends of friends were affected by the tragedy, and so for him the tragedy really hit home.  Lee is definitely shaken by the...

Having recovered from my losses at the Turning Stone casino the other day, I was glad that God put me back on the road of making my life more sensible than the extravagance of losing $200 at the blackjack tables.  I don’t mourn my wasted money, as I have been wasting money all of my life.  But what I did discover was that $200 is a lot of money for me, and while people sometimes lose thousands upon thousands of dollars in just a few...

Like a lot of my poet friends I tried to write 30 poems in 30 days in April for National Poetry Month...

A poem by Obododimma Oha

This is the final installment of Guide to the Guides; I’ve covered most of my own books that I thought most important, and I’m ready to write about different subjects. I hope someone has found this useful. But before I dwell too much on the end, I’d like to comment on Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway (I base my review on the fifth edition published in 2000). I debated for a while whether or not to cover this, since it’s a textbook...

I decided yesterday that I wanted to get out of Albany for a little while and check out the rest of the world beyond it.  That’s when some stroke of genius came to me, as I organized my friends and checked out the Turning Stone Hotel and Casino on Native American soil about two hours west of Albany.  We took one car up there, as it was four of us who went, and we arrived ready to play the casino table games when we arrived. ...

It is quite possible that Cervantes intended the Don to be a satirical comment on artists and art.

John McCaffrey, from his rooftop, dictates to his boy-Friday.

Ian McCaul examines Jerome Stern's "Making Shapely Fiction."

It has been a wonderful week for poetry here in the Capital Region, and it kicked off this weekend with two of the great Albany street poets: Don Lev and Don Levy, both of whom spoke at the Robert Burns statue in Washington Park on Saturday night.  The venerable Donald Lev, already a certified master at what he does, read first from his newly published book “A Very Funny Fellow”, and he was, just by the way he looked, read, and...