• Columns,  One Thing or Another Columns

    One Thing or Another: Not So Fast (Age and the Morning Routine)

    June 17, 2018 /

    It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

    By Mark McNease

    I hope my morning routine hasn’t stretched to an hour when I’m seventy, and I certainly hope I can accomplish it unaided. I’m trying.

    I used to be able to get up, shower, dress, and ready myself for another day faster than the opening theme song to the morning news. By the time the anchors announced the top stories, I was pouring my second cup of coffee and adjusting my tie, fully prepared to meet the demands of a stalled career.

    How does anyone without superpowers accomplish this? Was there a phone booth in the bathroom, into which I hurried one minute and emerged from the next scrubbed and presentable? Or was it youth itself? A youth that extended into my fifties before vanishing into the mists of a morning routine grown longer by the year?

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  • Columns,  One Thing or Another Columns

    One Thing or Another: Not Worth the Weight

    May 6, 2018 /

    It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

    By Mark McNease

    The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia.

    My Amazing Weight Loss Journey began five years ago. With great effort and dedication, I’ve managed to shed four pounds since that first fateful calorie count. How did I achieve this feat of negligible weight loss? I never thought you’d ask.

    It all started with a now-defunct company called Lean Chefs. For a reasonable fee, they delivered a day’s worth of prepared food while we slept: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two yummy snacks. The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia. I would peer into the corridor first thing in the morning and there it was, a small black package at my feet, looking like something that might require a call to the bomb squad under normal circumstances. Inside it was the coming day’s food with an ice pack and an unspoken promise: eat these healthy provisions, and only these, and miracle weight loss will occur.

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  • 6 Questions,  Interviews,  Latest

    6 Questions for Professor Drewey Wayne Gunn

    April 24, 2018 /
    Professor Gunn

    We learned last week of the passing of Professor Drewey Wayne Gunn. Many of us knew Professor Gunn for his generosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of gay literature, especially forgotten gay literature by authors who paved the way for later generations. I had the pleasure of interviewing him and being amazed at his extensive answers and his deep knowledge of a subject he was devoted to. Here is a reprint of that interview. – Mark/Editor

    I was recently introduced by a mutual friend to Drewey Wayne Gunn, Professor Emeritus , Texas A&M University–Kingsville. Professor Gunn has long been interested in recovering forgotten works of gay literature and has produced a treasure trove of guidebooks in his effort to acknowledge the many authors who, while largely ignored or forgotten, paved the way for the richness and variety we now enjoy in gay literature.

    His books include the upcoming Gay American Novels, 1870 – 1970 (McFarland, 2016), as well as Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth, 1881 – 1981 (McFarland, 2014), 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction, edited with Jaime Harker (Massachusetts, 2013), The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film (Scarecrow, 2013), and The Golden Age of Gay Literature, editor (MLR, 2009).

    I had the pleasure of asking Professor Gunn ‘6 Questions’ about his books, his passion for forgotten works, and how he thinks we can best keep our literary heritage alive. – Mark McNease/Editor

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  • Columns,  One Thing or Another Columns

    One Thing or Another: All Boxed Up

    April 22, 2018 /

    It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

    By Mark McNease

    Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation?

    How many boxes does it take to hold a life? It’s a question many of us ask when we find ourselves moving from one home to another. A home is in many ways who we are: that place where we’ve spent most of our time, where we’ve created identities linked to the rooms in which we sleep, eat and bathe, and where we contemplate our daily existence. Then a new phase beckons, a new adventure, and we see it all in front of us, boxed and packed to be taken by car, truck or hand cart to the next phase, the next identity with a few revisions.

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  • 6 Questions,  Interviews

    6 Questions for Author Paula Martinac

    March 10, 2018 /
    Paula Martinac

    By Mark McNease

    I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author Paula Martinac. Her latest novel, The Ada Decades, tells the story of Ada Shook, a librarian who begins the book as a child discovering a shocking postcard image in her father’s possession, and ends seven decades later as a reluctant witness to history. Told in eleven interconnected stories, the novel examines issues of race, class, and the slow climb toward LGBT equality in a pre-Stonewall world.

    See Paula’s in-depth answers to ‘6 Questions’ below, and mark your calendars: I’ll be chatting with Paula on a podcast sometime in the next month or two. I’m excited to continue our conversation. For now …

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