David Klein's Blog, page 10

I Presented at Pecha Kucha Last Night

I had the honor and pleasure last night of being one of eight presenters at Pecha Kucha night hosted by the Opalka Gallery at Sage College. Pecha Kucha is a unique and fascinating presentation format. Every presenter works within the same structure. You get 20 slides, each slide stays on screen for 20 seconds and […]

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What Happened to the Babysitter?

Another innovative writer has died. Beginning in the late 1960s, Robert Coover emerged as a star of metafiction—fiction rejects narrative conventions and realism. It uses language, style, and structure to point out the artificiality of itself. Last week, I wrote about “To Whom It May Concern:” by another metafiction god, Raymond Federman. This week, Robert […]

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TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I earned my MA at the University of Buffalo in the writing program chaired by Raymond Federman—a name you’ve likely never heard. Federman was born in 1928 in France and at age fourteen his parents hid him in a closet while the German Gestapo rounded up the Jews in Paris and sent them to perish […]

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Frank Perrone

He has one job. It’s not even a job—it’s a privilege and an honor: making love to his beautiful wife. On an August Saturday morning at first light, end of summer, a day off for both of them, the window raised and a quiet breeze from the lake fluttering the curtains. This is the day […]

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Six Words Times Twenty

At the opposite end of the spectrum from those 100,000-word novels I tend to write are six-word stories I also enjoy. One of the most famous six-word stories ever written, and perhaps the most devastating, is by Ernest Hemingway. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I’ve written six-word memoirs and six-word Covid stories. Now here […]

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ALL FOURS, Miranda July

Midlife crisis novels are nothing new, but Miranda July’s “All Fours” is. Typically when you think of a midlife crisis, what comes to mind might be the frustrated husband who buys his sports car and has an affair, or the neglected wife who searches for meaning after her children are grown or visits the plastic […]

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My Golden Era

Four years ago I stopped mowing a section of lawn behind my house.  It was a couple of hundred square feet we no longer needed for soccer, baseball, and football from when the kids were young. I no longer built backyard ice rinks. What was the point of having all that lawn? I allowed the […]

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Reflection as Reality

On a secluded mountain lake, a silent, cool morning, I am compelled by reality’s transient and illusory nature. The simultaneous coexistence of two states: the object and its mirrored image. The reflection is and is not reality. Both conditions feel true. Like our own reflections in the mirror: it’s us but not us. The two […]

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A Suit for Two Occasions

I’m putting on my suit for my nephew’s wedding. Jack and Kristin are getting married today on a perfect September day in Portland, Maine. It’s true: I own only one viable suit, and I haven’t worn it since . . . there’s something in the jacket pocket, and I pull it out—a memorial card for […]

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The To-Do List

“Learn a New Skill.” This item has been on my To-Do list since I started making such a list a couple of months ago. I turned to list-making because I didn’t always remember what I wanted or needed to do, and a few tasks were slipping through the cracks. I haven’t yet crossed “Learn a […]

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