Stories
Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays
Three Words: a Telling
Three Words The stories all agree, it was the children who did it. I’ve tried to piece the truth together by looking for commonalities between the various tellings of the story. All of the tellings describe a rising tide of anger among the youth. The growing...
Imagine
Imagine I was in New York City the night John Lennon was killed. After visiting with my folks around Thanksgiving, I celebrated my birthday on the sixth with my girlfriend Lisa in New Jersey, then caught a bus up to the city to visit my friends Bill and Karen. We...
Weather Report
Weather Report (short fiction by Ken Zimmerman) -- I’d like to tell you I received this a few weeks ago, as an anonymous email with the title Weather Report on its subject line. I’d even mention that I recognized the writing style as that of a former student who...
The Night Timothy Leary Threw Himself Into My Arms
There was that one night when Timothy Leary threw himself into my arms— literally— and over and over again, too. It was spring term, 1988, and I was working hard on writing the poems to finish up my MFA thesis. But Kesey’s novel class was in the revision stage, and...
A Memory of Dennis Banks
A Memory of Dennis Banks The death of the great Native American elder and leader Dennis Banks brought back to me the time I got the chance to meet and listen to him, and to sweat with him, as well. What a powerful man, and what an amazing experience for a young hippie...
Salto Profundo: Prelude
Prelude: Rio Profundo “The river has an ending, but it does not end. It has a beginning, but it never began.” (from the blog of Ricky Gnarsky) Above mountains and under clouds a Chilean condor soars, his broad wings—three full meters from tip to tip—catching the...
For Ken, Who Saved My Life
For Ken, Who Saved My Life In the fall of 1977 I moved to New York City, having dropped out of college to become a hippie poet along with my buddies Tony and Bill. We were going to start a new magazine of American surrealism, which we already called New Honolulu...
The Ones Who Walk In
The Ones Who Walk In (a parable, with apologies and respects to Ursula K. LeGuin) Imagine a wilderness, a paradise of nature. Let’s call it Or-gone. There, green woods grow out of good ground, and deer and wolf and bear and weasel prowl among the trees, eagle and...
Walking Away: Some words for Ursula K. LeGuin
Ursula LeGuin died today. Though I’ve seen her read her works and speak several times, I met her only once, in 1988. For a few years back then, the What’s Happenin’ weekly paper, now the Eugene Weekly, sponsored a writing contest for poetry and fiction, which was...
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