Dec 08
Westminster Church serves and delivers turkey dinners to the hungry. On Thanksgiving morning, Detroit police, mostly older and maybe even retired, load large quantities of food into the trunks of their police cruisers. Beyond the curbside cars, two lines form–one to eat and one to serve. I join the serving line and notice a hunger …
Nov 08
A screenplay bridges the gap between novel and movie and converts the story into images and dramatized action. In the narrative-heavy novel, The Revenant by Michael Punke, readers know Hugh Glass’s thoughts and motivations as if inside his head, third person point of view close. Although this works well in the book “The Revenant – …
Oct 08
Michael Punke found enough good ideas in the journals about Hugh Glass to write a novel. At the end of the book, the author acknowledged his historical uncertainties. Alejandro G. Inarritu also found good ideas in The Revenant about the life of Hugh Glass. Inarritu strayed far enough from the Punke story to barely …
Sep 08
Words express emotions, actions and sensations. Both short Hemingway-ish power sentences and long clause-embedded beauties force me to marvel at the craft, inventive structure and grammatical placement. I go back, reread and savor an author’s phrase word by word. Reading is good food for the brain. Now science proves what literature already knew. Neuroscience News …
Aug 08
Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies falls into my newly created genre of relationship, or quite simply, “apres romance.” This novel begins at the most extreme height of passion, usually where most romance plots end. Yet does this relationship feel real? With the help of Professor Mark Leary at Duke University, I apply Understanding the Mysteries …