Nolan needs Dairy Queen.
Don’t make fun and don’t be mean.
I really need to make the scene
Near that fabulous shake machine.

Photo credit: Mbrickn, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Nolan needs Dairy Queen.
Don’t make fun and don’t be mean.
I really need to make the scene
Near that fabulous shake machine.

Photo credit: Mbrickn, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The former Roanoke Times building is now the administration offices for Roanoke City Public Schools.
It feels so weird to me — maybe because the building was one of the first landmarks I remember seeing when I first came to Roanoke.

I’m sorry to report here that “The Exorcist: Believer” (2023) is indeed a bit lackluster. (The buzz online was pretty critical of the this latest entry in the franchise.)
It starts off strongly enough. The story’s setup is methodical and well paced, that characters feel real, and the movie does a good job building tension. It’s in the latter half that the movie falls short — it slides into a chaotic jumble of characters and story elements. There is one major story development that arrives as a welcome reference to the classic 1973 original film … but it’s written off in an unsatisfying way that has little effect on the plot as a whole. (I am being intentionally vague here to avoid spoilers.)
There are a few things to like here … it is definitely a little scary in a couple of places. And the two girls playing the afflicted teenagers (Lidyah Jewett and Olivia O’Neill) are superb.
“The Exorcist: Believer” isn’t a bad horror movie, exactly. It’s really just average — and it has the misfortune of being compared to the original.

I am so pleased to see a trio of my poems appear today over in the pages of The Piker Press. The set of three is entitled “Three Dreamers,” and the poems are as follows: “The Writer,” “The Secretary” and “The Bureaucrat.”
I wrote “Three Dreamers” very early in my career as a poet, and they were meant as a sort of creative experiment. I wanted to see whether I could characterize three different fictional characters who have relationships with one another. (The people portrayed here were imagined as office co-workers.)
Thanks once again to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice at The Piker Press!
I hope you will all join me in congratulating Adele Evershed as Spillwords Press Author of the Month for November 2023.
(Thanks also to those of you who voted for me, as I was a nominee as well. I am flattered if you did so.) 🙂
Nobody tell her that I am just sitting here stuffing my face and watching “The Zombie Diaries” (2006). (It’s been a long day, people.)

I am absolutely honored today to see three of my poems published in Issue 26 of Impspired in the United Kingdom. The three poems are “At the Coffee Shop,” “Autumn Girl” and “A Poet’s Short Note to His Muse.”
You can find all three poems right here. The print edition will be released at the end of January.
Thanks once again to Editor Steve Cawte for allowing me to see my work appear in such an outstanding independent literature magazine!

So this is the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., these days. I saw a play there as a college student in 1994 or so. (There was a major renovation and expansion project since my days at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.)
I don’t even remember which production we saw, to be honest with you. (I’m pretty sure it was Shakespeare.) But I remember that the trip seemed exciting. Fredericksburg really was just a mid-sized town back in the 1990’s. Going into Washington D.C. at night with about 100 other theater students to see a live production felt like a pretty big deal.
And the trip and the show were a blast.

Photo credit: Ron Cogswell, 2011

Photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlTAobYSR5k&list=FLEjGv3WZw134CN_yJVg3_Hg&index=1143