Barry Graham's Blog, page 37

St. Matthew’s Shelter for Men, Easter 2007. Randy, me, Greg, Brother Ron

I’m sad to hear of the death of my friend Brother Ron Fender, a Gregorian monk and Zen practitioner who lived among the homeless people he ministered to in Chattanooga, TN. He was a Bodhisattva who, when we first met in 2006, was living at St. Matthew’s Shelter where he served the men there as “a listener and spiritual companion.” He told me: “I work at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen as an...

I just received this wonderful book as a gift from my Dharma brother Ango:

In addition to Jinje’s teachings, the book contains beautiful woodcuts, such as this:

And this:

Ango tells me: “These days in Korea, it is said that there are two great masters…Songdam Sunim in the north, and Jinje Sunim in the south.”

The fourth Noir at the Bar PDX had strong performances from true crime writer Nancy Rommelmann (whom I hadn’t seen since the night I heckled J.T. Leroy/Laura Albert three years ago), the brilliant Rios de la Luz, who’s a fiction writer beyond category, Johnny Shaw, and J. David Osborne, who closed the show hilariously by reading pieces from a work-for-hire novel he wrote, interspersed with the editor’s emails to him. Tiffany Scandal was on the bill, but an injury prevented her from being ther...

This is the fourth Portland Noir at the Bar—bestselling novelist Johnny Shaw launching his new book Floodgate (which is a riot), J. David Osborne, author of Black Gum and other terrific novels, Rios de la Luz, author of the great story collection The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert…

And me. I’ll recite from memory a chunk of my first novel, Of Darkness and Light, which I wrote 28 years ago, and which has been making people sleep with the light on since its publication by B...

Love: A Dharma Talk for Valentine’s Day, given by me at The Sitting Frog Zen Center in Phoenix, AZ a few years ago.

My first visit to Portland was in the winter of 1996, on a book tour. It was me, novelist Peter Plate, and our then-publisher Gary Hustwit (who was doing the driving), on a West Coast tour. We started in Phoenix, where I lived, then San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland and Seattle. Bright sunshine, freezing rain, dark skies, black ice. Speeding tickets were part of the budget.

It was a tough ride; Plate was in severe back pain and wore a brace, only taking it off to perform...

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Thanks to Bart Lessard for the cover design.

This story has a turbulent history. I finished writing it one morning in 1995, in a cafe in London. I remember the feeling of tears on my face, and the look I got from the guy behind the counter. Ten years later, it was published in the anthology Homewrecker—but the publisher, Soft Skull, accidentally left out the ending, and, to add injury to injury, didn’t pay me or, as far as I know, any of the other contributors, even though they later sold foreign rights. The pe...

February morning—
shard of moon melts
in blue sky

Too much criticism—e.g. Rebecca Solnit’s analysis of Frankenstein, in which Solnit seems preoccupied with Mary Shelley’s life rather than the novel she wrote—is about adding, piling, things on top of what’s there, rather than examining it as it is. While purportedly examining a wall, such critics get a projector and use it to project their own images onto the wall—and, in discussing it, they ignore the wall and are caught up in belief in the projection.