Blog #126; New Look; Free Books Available Soon; New Compact Collection TBD; Putting Out My Shingle as a Creative Writing Coach

 Welcome to the new look of the blog page!  Thanks to my ever-talented wife, Erin!  This look better reflects who I am and what I’m about.

In the next few days, we will have some free digital books available to gear up towards the holiday season.  If you’ve already bought and read the book (and liked it, I hope), consider buying copies for friends and family!  (or, during my specials, getting them for free)

Also, I have been having things published more online in the past year than in all others combined.  That means I have more stories to include in the latest compact collection, which I want to release before Christmas.  It is called, No More Tragic Kingdoms.  You can read the title story here: https://militaryexperience.org/as-you-were-the-military-review-vol-20/no-more-tragic-kingdoms/

Please keep in touch for more info about this release as matters develop!

 

Also, though I have rarely brought attention to it in the past on this blog, I have many years (decades) creative writing teaching experience (college level creative writing courses, workshops with other writers and editors, and one-on-one consulting work).  If you are interested in bringing your stories, poetry, etc. to the next level and are ready to put my extensive experience to work for you, please contact me at provocanyonreview@gmail.com.

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Blog #125; Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea Re-considered

I am currently re-reading that 20^th C. classic, The Old Man and the Sea and plumbing the depths of the old master’s talent.  When a young man studying creative writing in Paris in the 1920s, the author famously said he wanted his readers, after finishing a book of his, to not be able to distinguish Hemingway’s well-crafted depictions and “felt-life” or an actual memory of a true experience.  Hemingway achieves this by painstaking selection of imagery (ie, description that appeals to the five senses).

 

While the old man is sailing the currents of the Caribbean outside Havana, Hemingway strategically places the reader right in the environment and experience.  The monumental fight with the marlin, the taste of the salt spray of the ocean water, the heat of the sun beating his exposed back, the ache of the muscles well past the point of failure.  Hemingway expresses the experience as only he can, and the reader’s experience of life is all the richer for it.