
I was a student enrolled in Carlow University’s Low Residency M.F.A. program the day I met Lewis “Buddy” Nordan. He was scheduled to read at one of our events in Pittsburgh. Many of the other students had been excited about the event most of the day. Past students had come to town for the [...]
“It’s interesting to think that with copyright law, as suggested in Creative License, being less than conducive to artists who use collage technique today, that Andy Warhol would have had as much success now.”

“So much of my writing process, be it fiction or creative non-fiction, especially in the first drafts, is semi-conscious and largely intuitive, so a part of me was not trying to capture “desperation” so much as the total experience, as I remembered it years later, of being the oldest boy in dangerous neighborhoods, small and weak and afraid, but having somehow internalized that it was up to me to be the man in the house now, a role I was clearly unsuited for..”

My War: Killing Time in Iraq By Colby Buzzell Berkley Caliber, paperback The mission flag in Iraq has been lowered, and the last of the troops are on their way out. A war that has existed for a decent part of my life has come to an end at last. Apropos to this enormous [...]

While visiting York College of Pennsylvania to give a reading, Marion took the time to sit down with me and answer some questions. In a closet. I’m kidding, of course, but only barely. The room in which we seated ourselves is not only window-less, but quite small–calling it cozy would be a rather generous [...]

Try, for a moment, to imagine a world without J.R.R. Tolkien. There would be no Frodo, no Shire, no Gandalf. But what else would disappear without this author? By my thinking, if Tolkien goes, so goes Prachett, Pullman, and…Rowling. Sure there were other fantasy authors during Tolkien’s time (the Inklings wouldn’t have been much [...]

Greetings Shaking followers. This is my first foray into the Shaking blog, but I feel that I deliver an important message. This is a blog about music and literature. We value music as and artistic endeavor. For those of you in the Lancaster, PA region, the Chameleon Club may be synonymous with the live [...]

Shaking recognizes R. A. (Stovetop) Lawson as the winner of the Michael V.R. Thomason Prize for best book on Gulf South and/or Caribbean History for 2010-2011.

This is a guest post by CalebJRoss (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t [...]

“Evil has become a product of manufacture, it is built into our whole industrial and political system, it is being manufactured every day, it is rolling off the assembly line, it is being sold in the stores, it pollutes the air… Perhaps the way to cope with the adversary is to confront him [...]

