Author: davidbiddle

The Voice of the Rising Tide

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I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness for the past year. I posted a note on that back in January of 2020 called “The Enlightened and the Lonely.” It was weirdly more prescient than I could have ever known.

Turns out we’re all insane and we’re all locked in the same institution together whether we like it or not. I did not see, however, that there would be a certain group of idiots stuck in this place with the rest of us who are dead set on fucking things up and being assholes. They are not funny, but they are hilarious at the same time. The riddle is how we manage to find a way to feel love for them even though they are such screw ups.

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About My Latest Story: “Animals with Nowhere to Go”

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I was so happy to see my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go”, published this month (January) at Jerry Jazz Musician. I wrote “Animals” specifically to enter the Jerry Jazz 55th short fiction contest last fall. Even though it only wound up short-listed (go to “Chromesthesia “ here to read the wonderful winning story by Shannan Brady) it is an honor to see my work alongside so many other great creative people’s.

I discovered Jerry Jazz about fifteen years ago while researching material for my novel Notes on the Golden Country (still a few years to go before it’s out). At the time, I was writing a rather freeform essay on the effect that Ralph Ellison’s work had on American literature. You can read that brief essay here. JJM is a wonderful repository for all things Ralph Waldo Ellison. I’d found my people.

I am a writer who has a tendency to connect his fiction and essays to musical questions and mysteries. I often go find the Jerry Jazz Musician website whenever I’m feeling beat up and ragged out from projects I’m working on. It’s a great source of inspiration for jazz culture lovers on all sorts of levels with poetry, essays, fiction, photos, videos, and book reviews on everyone from John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk to James Baldwin and jazz chronicler Gary Giddins.

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Back from Facebook Freedom

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I last reported that I’d flown the Facebook coop and planned on living happily ever after. That was in mid-January of 2020. I’d only put my account on pause at that point. I had every intention of walking away for good, but as a lifelong professional planner I knew better than to burn a bridge or cut a tie or murder the messenger too swiftly.

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Sayonara Facebook: exactly 12 years

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I have finally ended my connection to Facebook. The last post I made was a link to Greta Thurnberg’s and George Monbiot’s three-minute and thirty-nine second YouTube video on solving the climate change riddle.

In preparation for shutting down my account, I first downloaded the Facebook file of my entire 12 year residency there. Quite fortuitously, or maybe not so much, I signed up to be part of that world on January 13, 2008. As I was downloading my file, I saw that it was the evening of January 13, 2020. Exactly twelve years on Facebook. Far out.

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The Enlightened and the Lonely

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Someone could become a millionaire selling a bumper sticker that says:

“If you don’t feel like you’re losing your mind these days, then you’re probably part of the problem.”

Over the past decade things in America just keep getting weirder and nastier. I’d like to blame that on social media and/or our ubiquitous portable communication devices, but I honestly don’t know if I have a leg to stand on with that.

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Anything and Everything: advice on reading and writing, plus desiring intimacy with that special weather person on TV

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Near the end of my senior year of high school, I asked my favorite instructor for advice on becoming a writer. Mr. Stawski was an extremely gifted English teacher, a PhD with 30+ years of teaching under his belt, certainly the most respected faculty member at our high school. He’d held a party for our Shakespeare class at his house. I was in a small group of students lingering after because it was so great to be around such a wonderful human being. I also wanted to hear his thoughts on what we should all be thinking about as we graduated and then headed off to college. Asking for advice on writing was also my way of telling him that I might be serious about pursuing a career as an author.

Mr. Stawski’s advice was simple and obvious. He looked me in the eyes and said: “Read as much as you can. People say writers need life experience, and I can’t argue with that, but it’s more important to read anything and everything–especially over the next decade or so as you mature.”

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Your Font Choice Says A Lot About Something

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Special Note: This post was composed a week prior to the decision to overhaul the theme for this website. Thus, the font reference below, "Domine," is now anachronistic and passé. The font family here, now, is Lora. Apologies for any confusion.

In the category of “Will the Internet Always Be a Wild West Show?” I want to discuss font choices online. There used to be fairly clear rules for when you use sans serif fonts and when serif ones were more appropriate. In the old days when you finally got that Mac and were confronted with this massive fruit basket of typefaces your instinct was to go hog wild. I have always loved Comic Sans and once used it to print out a draft of a short story I’d written, only to find myself dizzy and feeling quite puckish reading half way through the second page.

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BULL Men’s Fiction and The Cannibal Talks

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My new story “MANY WAYS TO FIND OUT” was featured at the BULL magazine website earlier this week. Bull specializes in quality fiction (and some essays) directed in varying ways at the complexity and dynamics of masculinity here in 2017.

There’s a theory out there that men don’t like to read “serious fiction.” I think a lot of men just don’t like to read crappy stories that have little to do with them. I might be wrong. Who knows?

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Making New Meaning: Fiction’s Role in Our New America

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I want to add something to the endless discussion about why it’s important to read literary fiction. The discussion is important.

You may have graduated from high school English class and feel like you never want to go back again, but you didn’t graduate from Life. Too many people have stopped reading quality fiction that makes them think about Life these days. That’s why this endless discussion about books and their import continues — taking the time to think about life is essential for all of us. Books assume that’s why you’re reading them — especially literary stories by anyone from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Joy Williams and James Salter.

You can find a lot of essays and blog posts out there on the value of novels, short stories, and plays because they teach empathy and help people understand another person’s point of view. Indeed, the written word in general is still the most effective way to express all the nuances of human emotion. These days, it feels in some ways that people are losing touch with emotional reality and concern for how other people feel in any number of social situations. Could it be that fewer people are reading quality fiction these days? Maybe people are spending less time with books and more time with porn and video games.

You can also find arguments on how readers of serious fiction are proven to be more intuitive, better problem solvers, superior communicators, and higher achievers at Continue reading →