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  • 2010
    • August
      • Guess Who Came To Dinner?
        08/22/10
        He was sitting behind the coffee-maker one morning, and there he stayed during the day, but at night he climbed the walls and ate whatever he pleased.

        One day we drove to the airport and when I opened the trunk of the car, there he was, all big-eyed and smiley faced. He thought he was

      • UFO Sighting
        08/04/10
        I once wrote a book about cattle mutilations in northern New Mexico. This was in 1979-1980. I traveled all over New Mexico interviewing ranchers, cattlemen, Pueblo Indians, Navajos, Hispanic farmers, scientists, authors, FBI and tribal police. The book came out to good reviews and I did some inte

    • July
      • Fireballs, Witches and El Diablo
        07/25/10
        I first heard about fireballs falling out of the sky when I was a student at Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico back in the 60s. When fireballs rained down upon a house in a village, neighbors would surround it. They'd form a circle around the house holding lanterns until the fireb

    • June
      • Time moves fast or slow?
        06/28/10
        I think time seems to be moving fast but it's really going slow.

        In the mid-nineties a computer-meister friend of ours said, "No one's ever going to make any money selling stuff on the internet." I told him I was posting all of my books on my website.

        He

      • Everybody Looks Like Somebody
        06/06/10
        Yeah, they do. Sometimes I'm not sure though -- it could be somebody else.

        I once had a conversation with Geronimo in Dunkin Donuts. Not the real Geronimo but one who looked like him. Iron Eyes Cody, or somebody who looked just like him, showed up at a reading I gave at Boca Raton

    • May
      • the bestest
        05/03/10
        I was telling stories at the Miami Public Library's "The Art of Storytelling" annual festival.

        Someone said, "I like those tall tales."

        Tall is just another word for s-t-r-e-t-c-h. You pull the tale along like taffy, you exaggerate, you draw it out u

    • April
      • Reading is writing
        04/12/10
        I bought a copy of The Lake Matters: Notes about Writing and Life by Aram Saroyan. Lorry had just made dinner and we were preparing to eat and there I was standing, reading Aram's book and loving it and I forgot about time. I was standing, reading. Time stopped. Dinner stopped. But life di

    • March
      • good beginnings
        03/28/10


        Mary woke up and broke her foot. Nobody was in the house. Her closet doors were shaking. She got up very quickly. She went to the kitchen to get the telephone and called 911. When the police got there she was on the floor dead.


        The above beginning of a story was writ

    • February
      • on the road again
        02/28/10
        Off and on, for the past two weeks I have been traveling, visiting schools and conferences and reading from my books. Having done this now for 35 years, I have to ask myself -- do I ever get tired of it?

        Truthfully, no.

        I love being in the midst of young readers.
        I love t

    • January
      • Living History
        01/22/10
        I have done two performances in the past two weeks. The first at Tice Elementary School in Tice, Florida. The second at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. Both were fun. And each time I learned something -- well, I always learn something. But at both events I re-discovered the power of m

  • 2009
    • December
      • The Girl Who Invented My Wife
        12/11/09
        A teen reader in Italy who is writing a report on my wife Loretta asked us for a complete biography. Loretta, or Lorry as most of us know her, wrote to her devoted reader saying that her biography and her husband's had sort of intertwined over the past 40 years of marriage, but she resurrected

    • November
      • Every Little Thing Gonna Be All Right
        11/16/09


        I was at the Miami Book Fair International for three days this past week. Telling stories. Seeing the unbelievable throngs of people passing between the rows of tents full of books. Being happy. Telling stories. Meeting new friends, seeing some old ones. I read our children's

      • a hazy shade of fantasy
        11/03/09
        You take a big Miami moon and mix it with a small bat boy, a sleeping beauty, a jack sparrow with all the requisite blue eyes and long dreadlocks, a kitty cat who turns into a donkey, a tall man with a small woman grafted to his tummy, an orange-suited convict, a blonde bombshell, a net-stockinged t

    • October
      • riddler in residence
        10/13/09
        We have just returned from the most wonderful school, The Chinquapin School in Highland, Texas. A student body consisting of 150 students, all of whom are on scholarship. The majority Hispanic. A smaller number African American, Caucasian and Asian. Nearly all come from economically disadvantaged

    • September
      • no news
        09/16/09
        My poet pen pal Bob Arnold asked me the other day -- "Who's minding the store?" By which he meant -- Where's the new blog? I told him there wouldn't be one until I went to the Miami Book Fair International and The Chinquaupin School in Houston, Texas. But then I started th

    • July
      • Hummingbirds & Moms
        07/29/09
        From the pineflats of Florida to the canyons of New Mexico we come to share our stories and poems with ourselves -- and with the hummingbirds.

        Lorry and I have been leading the Green River Writers Workshop with founder Alice Carney for the last two years, but this is the first year th

    • June
      • LOST & FOUND
        06/25/09
        I've been on the road again. This time to the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

        Half my life was spent under the Berkshire pines of Lake Buel. We have a little cabin on top of a piney wood hill there. My father built it, my brother rebuilt it, and now I'm fixing it up. Not much

    • April
    • March
      • TIME SWIMMER
        03/06/09


        Time Swimmer is just out with Macmillan Caribbean. You can see it posted at 'gerald's bookstore' on this very site. A student asked me yesterday -- "What book has the most of YOU in it?" We forget sometimes that kids like to know their author as much as they

    • February
      • Red Hats
        02/09/09
        We just returned from a school visit at Buena Vista Elementary School, in Greer, South Carolina. You may not think it gets cold there, but let me tell you, it does. Lorry and I wore multiple shirts and sweatshirts one night. The following day at the school, Karen Grimwood, the librarian, met us w

    • January
      • Kit Kat's Portrait
        01/16/09
        I have written of Kit Kat, our snowshoe Siamese in another blog. If you haven't read that one -- The Cat Who Ate Skinks and Slept on Chiles -- scroll down and check it out. Among other things, it's about Kit Kat's nine lives. Here in Florida, cats get sick after eating skinks. Sic

      • Storytelling at Koucky Gallery & Gardens
        01/12/09
        The first story I learned as a five-year-old wasn't a story -- it was something that happened to me. Afterwards it became a story. Now it's one of my favorites and I tell it often. I told it last Saturday at Koucky Gallery & Gardens in Bokeelia on Pine Island on the Southwest Coast o

  • 2008
    • December
      • Good News
        12/28/08
        Our Armenian friend in Fresno used to read our fortunes. First she poured the thick sweet Turkish coffee into the tiny cup. Then when we got to the bottom where the grounds looked like mud, she'd turn the cup upside down, wait a few minutes, and tell our fortune. She usually batted about 100

      • Do You Remember Me?
        12/21/08
        I remember things -- I really do.

        This morning I received an email from a middle school girl who wrote to me in 1999 and asked me to come to her school in Accord, New York. Now, it just so happened that I knew a great teacher from that school. Later on my teacher friend arranged for me

    • November
      • Why aren't you your favorite author?
        11/21/08
        Kids take you by surprise. That's what's so fun about school visits.

        I did a talk the other day at Gulf Elementary School. I've been going to Gulf for at least ten years now. Liz Olancin, who runs the Gifted Program at Gulf, asked me to visit the school in 1996 as I reca

    • October
      • Back of the Bus Storyteller
        10/24/08
        Every fall and spring I am on the road visiting schools, museums, galleries and gatherings. I was in Miami last weekend telling stories and making "sounds" for the Children's Museum Sound Month program. I learned to do audio noises, ambient sounds when I was a kid. This is how it h

      • The Book Room Cat
        10/15/08
        Cats have been household guardians since the earliest of times. Before that, they were cave guardians. And before that, they watched us, cold eyed and curious, from the edge of our fat-dripping campfire. Or some such. We have a cat named Dirty Harry. Don't let me go on about how she, not h

      • The Cat Who Ate Skinks and Slept on Chiles
        10/03/08
        We have a trim little Snowshoe Siamese cat named Kit Kat who is a lizard chaser. This is a dangerous occupation in Southwest Florida -- not because of the Cuban anoles which are generally everywhere but because of the five-lined skinks that are secretively somewhere.

        Cats on Pine Islan

    • September
      • Once in Vermont
        09/16/08
        Every so often I think of my friend Virginia Kherdian saying, "Writers certify the places where they live and they make them possible for other people to live there. Cities and towns, mountains, and valleys -- once written about -- become certified."

        I visited Carmel, Californ

      • Jack Kerouac, Typist
        09/11/08
        It was Truman Capote who declared that Jack Kerouac was not a writer -- "That's not writing; that's typing." Funny, he said that. Today, more young people read Kerouac than have ever heard of Capote. As a psychologist told me, "I work with a troubled youngster who often sa

    • August
      • Carmen & the Lizard
        08/26/08

        Carmen came into our lives right after Tropical Storm Fay. The lizard appeared a little later, but I am getting ahead of myself. Entire civilizations have been built -- I just read -- on the beauty of women, or, as in Helen of Troy or Cleopatra, the beauty of one particular woman.

      • Iridescent Sharks
        08/19/08
        Tropical Storm Fay just vacated our part of SW Florida. She leaves behind her a spackling of leaves and paperwood bark pressed against our stucco walls so that they look like Japanese rice paper. She's gone now but she did make a mark, if only an artistic one on our property. We were prepare

      • Cloud Runner, Cloud Swimmer
        08/08/08
        The dog days of summer are upon us. I've been spending the afternoons cloud swimming. My friend, the great running coach, Fred Maas, got my attention when he started sending me photographs of him training for the Pike's Peak Marathon. Fred runs, literally, into the clouds. He's at

    • July
      • Rootbeer Bear, Blue Mammoth, Shell Phone & Ocean
        07/30/08
        I have been in New Mexico for the past ten days. My wife Lorry is from there, my brother Sid and cousin Peter live there and I was a New Mexico boy for twenty-some years. Going back is coming home. And waking to coyotes in the early morning, hearing them spill their sad, mad delirious song in

      • silence slithered back and forth between the line
        07/15/08
        "Silence slithered back and forth between the line" is from Trent Zelazny's soon-to-be published novel Unknown Destination. He's a terrific writer, like his father but different. I couldn't get his book, or his slithery line out of my mind last night because we were having

      • To the Blue Mountains of Jamaica with Roger Zelazny
        07/07/08
        Every summer it happens. I think continually of my friend Roger Zelazny. It's hard to believe that I haven't seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. He has been gone from this earth since June 14, 1995. We moved to Florida one year before that and so the last time I saw Roger was in

    • June
      • Mullet Gizzards
        06/27/08
        Whenever Lorry and I get antsy here on Pine Island, we get off the island. But we never get very far. Yesterday we got as far as Matlacha, a neighborhing island. That's a distance of about six miles from our doorstep, if you're driving, which we were. But if you were paddling a canoe,

      • The Parrot In The Freezer
        06/20/08
        We've had George the parrot for thirty years and he won't shut up unless he wants to. Parrot's prerogative. But sometimes I say, "George, if you don't pipe down, I'm gonna . . ." George cocks an evil eye, as if to say, "Yeah? What?"

        There&#

      • We are lost, the captain shouted
        06/06/08
        My friend Karl has a way with words. I have been listening to him tell stories since I was a small boy. Today, he's 94. But he doesn't look it. He moves slow. But going down the stairs, and tricky, narrow stairs at that, he never holds the rail as I do, as everyone else does. Karl�

    • May
      • New Site
        05/29/08
        Welcome to the new web site and blog! Please check back as additional items will be posted going forward. Please comment on the new site. Thanks!