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One Thing or Another: The Exuberance Principle
By Mark McNease
Here’s a challenge: Try to recall the experiences you had as a child exploring a world that was constantly presenting you with new sights, sounds, tastes, places and people. Then try to re-experience that excitement, that sense that you have never been in this moment before and if you don’t live it right this instant you’ll never have that chance again. It’s very difficult. Our lives’ accumulations of responsibilities, disappointments, obligations, and sheer repetitive behaviors make that long-ago feeling of wonder as hard to reclaim as youth itself. Life can seem, after thousands of days matched by nights that bridge them one to the next, anything but exciting. Unless …
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One Thing or Another: The Joys of Being a (Almost) Halloween Baby
By Mark McNeaseOctober has always been my favorite month. It’s the month when autumn really makes itself felt, especially if you live where the seasons are discernible. (It recently went from air conditioner weather at the tail end of a relentlessly hot summer, to a sudden and unexpected freeze with a 30-degree drop). It’s flu season, which is always good for a sick day or two spent lying on the couch taking over-the-counter cold remedies that do nothing to stop you from feeling like you’re dying. Honey, is the healthcare directive in place? You’re sure you’ve still got your copy? And, How about the will? Can I change it by tomorrow? My sister forgot my birthday, I’m not sure she deserves the belt buckles.
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One Thing or Another: From The Wheelchair’s Perspective
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Some days just feel longer than others. They seem to deliberately stretch out an extra few hours so we’ll have more time to dwell on all our dissatisfactions, insecurities and complaints. And it doesn’t help to think that each day is irreplaceable, that the box of days I’d been given when I first screamed my way into the world in some delivery room in Mississippi is now about three-quarters empty. Why would the urgency of lives spent in a flicker reach my consciousness when I was busy ruminating on all the things that bothered me?
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One Thing or Another: The Vision Thing
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
One thing you can say about aging is that it offers something for everyone. If your knees aren’t buckling yet, you might have stiffness in various joints; if your joints aren’t betraying you after decades of an intimate relationship, it might take you twice as long to get out of bed in the morning as it did way back in your 40s. Between the added weight most of us take on like an unwanted passenger and the silent creaking of bones that would rather stay on the mattress another twenty minutes, rising and shining can sound like the command of a drill sergeant.
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One Thing or Another: The O-Word
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
The late George Carlin once lamented in his stand-up routine that no one gets old anymore. We’re all just “older.” It’s one of those word games we play with ourselves, masking, and in some cases burying, truths we find inconvenient or unpleasant. After all, we can be older indefinitely; getting and being old has the sound of finality, or at least of an end approaching faster than we’d anticipated.
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One Thing or Another: Laughing Matters
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
What’s funny can be very subjective, unique to each of us as we find some things to be laughing matters and quite a few others not to be. But how often do we stop and think about our sense of humor itself, and what it does for us? Laughing lets off steam, certainly. It releases tension—most clearly in nervous laughter. He didn’t kill me after all! Ha! Or, I was just kidding when I said you were a narcissistic prick! Don’t fire me! Ha! It provides communion. It even distorts faces and occasionally sends us into paroxysms of uncontrolled guffaws. But have you ever considered that it saves lives?
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6 Questions for Author Michael Graves
Michael Graves By Mark McNease
I recently had the pleasure of asking author Michael Graves ‘6 Questions.’ Michael is the author of Dirty One, a collection of short stories that was both a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and an American Library Association Honoree. His new novel, Parade, is set for release by Chelsea Station Editions October 1. Described as “a tour-de-force, comic tale of religion and government,” the book tells the story of Reggie Lauderdale in the midst of his crisis of faith. His cousin, Elmer Mott, dreams of becoming their hometown mayor. Both boys are doing their best to be adults in suburbia, but have yet to learn to be fully themselves.
Read on for Michael’s answers, some advance praise for Parade, and stay tuned – he’ll be a guest soon on the Live Mic Podcast in early October.
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One Thing or Another: I Was Telling Me Just the Other Day …
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
It’s been a little alarming to observe myself in conversation with me more openly and regularly these days. What I’d once considered a trait of people who meander sidewalks aimlessly or decline to take medication, I now see as a sign I’m either not quite right, or I’ve lost the ability to keep my inner dialogue private—just between the two of me, so to speak.
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One Thing or Another: Learning to Live with the Typos in Life
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
I was reading something I’d written recently and noticed a typo. My first reaction was anger and embarrassment. Alone at my desk at sunrise, I looked around to make sure no one could see my crime—so strong is the shame and so universal the condemnation of typographical errors. How could I possibly have not seen my mistake before I put it out there for everyone to ridicule and use as proof that I don’t care or, worse, that I’m unprofessional?
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One Thing or Another: A Word On Forgetting, Before I Forget
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
You’ve had this conversation before, probably recently: Your co-worker, family member or friend asks you some variation of the question, “Did you wash my bowl in the sink?” (Or, did you take my pen, my keys, my cell phone, or some other object I swear had been where it is not now.) Even more alarming, you may be the one initiating this exchange and unable to remember something you’d done just ten minutes ago. If you’re forty, you probably dismiss it as a consequence of distraction. If you’re fifty, you shrug it off as forgetfulness. But if you’re fifty-six (my age), or older, you hear the little voice in your head whispering, “Early onset! Early onset!”
You don’t know exactly what is hitting you earlier than expected, but you’re convinced this is the beginning of the end of your ability to remember anything. You head to the drugstore for a bottle of Gingko Biloba, which you will forget to take. You look online for various illnesses that affect memory, wondering if any of them is the cause of your not remembering washing that bowl (with special dread reserved for Alzheimer’s). You take up crossword puzzles or Sudoku. You leave sticky notes to remind yourself of anything more significant than a trip to the bathroom, and you pray it’s a temporary lapse because the alternative is terrifying.
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6 Questions for Author Kate McLachlan
I recently happened upon Kate McLachlan’s new book, Ten Little Lesbians, on the “hot new releases” list for LGBT mysteries on Kindle. I loved the cover and soon found myself thoroughly enjoying the story of ten women stranded at the lesbian-owned Adelheid Inn in the Cascade Mountains after a mudslide closes the only road out. Murder and mystery ensue in a delicious Agatha Christie homage with a distinctly lesbian twist.
I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather pose ‘6 Questions’ to than Kate. A double Goldie Award winner from the Golden Crown Literary Society and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, Kate shares her experiences, work and insights into the writing life. – Mark
MM: You’ve written a good number of books, including the RIP (“Rip Van Dyke”) time-travel series, mysteries, and the romance “Christmas Crush” that was a Lambda Literary Finalist in 2014. Have you always been a writer? What trajectory has your writing taken over the years? (That’s a twofer.)
KM: I’ve always been a writer in the sense that I’ve always written something, whether it was diary entries, journal entries, poetry that NOBODY ever saw, or the beginnings of stories without end. I wrote my first novel when I was in my mid-30’s, a historical adventure book for middle-school kids. I was teaching at the time, and I wrote the book to try to make ancient Rome come alive for my 6th graders. They seemed to like it, and I sent it off to some agents. This was in the mid-90’s. Publishing companies wouldn’t even read your query letters if you were unrepresented, and expensive vanity presses were the only choice for self-publishing. I had no luck finding an agent, so I stuck the book in a drawer, and there it still sits. I had proved to myself that I could finish a book, though, so I continued on that path. I decided to write what I enjoyed reading, so I wrote a few mysteries. Three of them still sit in that same drawer with my children’s novel, but two of them–after many intervening years filled with law school, career change, and coming out–have since been extensively rewritten and published as Hearts, Dead and Alive and Murder and the Hurdy Gurdy Girl. -
6 Questions for Author Maurice W. Dorsey, PhD
Author Maurice W. Dorsey was recently nominated for a QBR Wheatley Book Award for Businessman First, his biography of Henry G. Parks, Jr.
I had the pleasure of meeting Maurice at this year’s Rainbow Book Fair – and now the double pleasure of asking him ‘6 Questions.’ His book, Businessman First, tells the story of Henry G. Parks, Jr., a successful African American businessman. Maurice was as nice and engaging as his book is fascinating – a story that both needed to be told, and that Maurice promised to tell. He has, in spectacular fashion.
MM: Congratulations on being nominated for a QBR Wheatley Book Award. Can you describe those awards and how you came to be nominated?MWD: QBR The Black Book Review, the Harlem Book Fair are partnered by the Columbia University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Literacy Partners, Inc. and C-Span Book TV. The Harlem Book Festival is the largest and most respected African American literary festival. I was recommended by a friend in Washington, DC.
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6 Questions for Author Marshall Thornton
Marshall Thornton If you’re a reader of gay mysteries, you’ll inevitably come across the name Marshall Thornton. His Boystown detective series is among the more widely known and admired series in the genre. The series received two honorable mentions and was a runner-up in the Rainbow Awards, and has twice been a finalist for the Lambda Book Award – Gay Mystery. He’s currently re-releasing the series, with Boystown 7: Bloodlines set for release in March.
Marshall’s a prolific writer, with books that include Desert Run, My Favorite Uncle, and The Ghost Slept Over, to name a few. Somehow he found time to answer ‘6 Questions’! And here they are … Mark McNease/Editor
MM: I was looking at your bio. Having lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I’m wondering: why Long Beach? What got you there?
MT: Like many decisions in life, moving to Long Beach was a bit random. In my early thirties I decided to go back to college to finish my B.A. I applied at both Cal State Northridge and Cal State Long Beach and got into both. The deciding factor was that the Cal State Long Beach brochure said that you could see the ocean from campus—and, if you go to the top of the tallest building you can. Looking back, that’s a ridiculous reason to choose a college. But I’ve been here about twenty-two years. It’s really a great city.
