Pittsburgh: The Nitty Gritty City (Article)

When I first moved into the apartment I live in now I was disappointed that it was in the back of the apartment building (I was tired of apartment hunting and was going to take the place if it was at all acceptable.) None of the apartments in the front of the building were available. [...]

College Town USA (Article)

I live in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  In Oakland are several universities: Carnegie Mellon, Carlow, Catham and the University of Pittsburgh which I graduated from in 2006 with an MFA in writing. There are other universities in the city, too: Duquesne University, Robert Morris University and Point Park University.    There are several campuses of [...]

My Life

Sometime yesterday afternoon my gout was nearly gone.  I had no pain and I could walk normal.  So today I went to computer school.  I checked my gmail and yahoo mail.  No job offers.  Wednesday there’s a jobfair at Mellon Arena downtown.  I’ll go to that. At school I punched up the latest update of [...]

The Twenty Dollar Suit (Flash Fiction)

The man hadn’t worn a suit in over thirty years. When he was young he pitied other men his age who had to go to work in suits. He was going to be a great photographer of beautiful, nude women and would dress as he pleased. Well, he did not become a great photographer of [...]

Flash Fiction Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (Article)

  Think about it. Every story was already told thousands of years ago. The only thing a writer can do now is to individualize and up date his or her story. So it’s not so much what the story is about as it is about how well the story is written. Once again we come [...]

My Life

Well, my gout is better today.  I went out and did some shopping: laundry liquid, newspaper, toilet paper, a Milky Way candy bar, a can of pork n’ beans and a six pack of A & W root beer.  The 54C bus inched through “Little Italy” in Bloomfield.  This weekend is the “Little Italy Festival” [...]

In The Shadow Of The Cathedral Of Learning (Flash Fiction)

I was back from Vietnam and discharged from the army. I was young and in college. A light snow was falling. It was night and I could see that farther down the avenue the commercial district was all lit up. I was glad I had decided to stay in Pittsburgh to go to school. I [...]

How To Write Flash Fiction (Article)

1) Keep the intro short. 2) Get immediately into the action. 3) Use dialogue to make the characters come alive. 4) Distrust all adverbs and adjectives 5) Cut all unnecessary words. 6) Have at least one round character. 7) A round character has internal conflict or inner doubt. Don’t explain the story; let the characters act [...]

Where To Get Story Ideas (Article)

I drink a lot of beer. I like classic rock and roll. As a nineteen-year-old I fought in Vietnam. My father was a wife beater. That’s why I joined the army at the age of eighteen. I grew up in a steel town. I grew up in the ghetto. I spent most of my life [...]

Life Is Art (Flash Fiction)

She and I were sitting at a table at the big window in the Sanctuary drinking mugs of cold beer. Before the Sanctuary went out of business, it was only a few blocks from the Cathedral of Learning of the University of Pittsburgh. My friend was in her forties and was working on her doctorate. [...]