A Prayer for Us

I stopped writing. Time slowed down to microseconds while my dad breathed out the spirit left in his body. Death has no friends. What I did instead was paint. Painting was new to me. I dove into it, finding in it a way to put myself elsewhere in a place with no words. Silence. There’s

Jared Sparks Ghost Detective #2: The Case of the Missing Ghost

Before she entered Murphy’s Pub, her third Irish bar in two days, Anastasia Brown sent a text to the office. She was supposedly snarled in traffic as she returned from the courthouse with a copy of the deed Jared needed. She worked for the Sparks Agency, a ghost and nephew run firm. Even though Anastasia’s

Back Porch Reading #4

Short reading recommendations, as you escape your house/office for a mug of joe on the porch–Sasquatch and Silver Lands folklore, a short story by Mark Twain, and a few comments about music. Sasquatch and the Bear American Folklore is a favorite website of mine for short reading. It is a whole library of stories from

English Makes No Sense!

Originally posted on English Makes No Sense:
I am so very happy that English is my fist language. I am trying to learn another language, Spanish, but the more I explore it and teach English as a second language, the greater my pleasure for having English as my first language. Why? Because English makes no…

Murder Ballads: Why I Did What I Did

Murder ballads lurk on the dark side of folklore. From The Twa Sisters, an old Northumbrian song, to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, written and sung by Bob Dylan, murder ballads narrate what happens when selfishness, jealousy, abuse, and revenge come into play.  Paul Slade describes murder ballads as “tabloid newspapers set to music,”

Emphatically a Bon-Bonist

Poe describes the devil as tall and skinny and wearing worn clothing made for a shorter person. Most of his head is bald except