My letter to the editor about conspiracy theories was also published by The Free Lance-Star. You can find it right here.
The Free Lance-Star is a leading regional news source with more than 65,000 weekday readers. I’m always especially pleased to see something I’ve written appear here, because Fredericksburg, Virginia is my college town. 🙂
Thanks yet again to the newspaper’s editorial staff for allowing me to share through this important source of news and commentary in northeast Virginia.
I’m quite happy tonight to share here that The Roanoke Star printed my latest letter to the editor — about the overreliance on “open-mindedness” in validating popular conspiracy theories. You can find it right here.
Thanks once again to Publisher Stuart Revercomb for allowing me to share my opinion through this first-rate resource for news and commentary in Roanoke, Virginia!
I am quite honored to report tonight that First Literary Review-East published my “Milky Way Haiku.” You can find it right here.
Thanks again, Editor Cindy Hochman, for deeming my work worthy of publication!
Blue is burning bright and deep
in the gardens of my sleep.
The ordered flowers of my dreaming
Mirror summer mid-day’s gleaming,
at attention, standing guard,
all about a child’s yard.
I am aging now. Does this
set the night to reminisce
and move my dreaming eye to roam
the backyard of my boyhood home?
There a firm azure replaces
all the old remembered faces.
There the bright battalion smolders —
upright rows of bluebell soldiers.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2022
Photo credit: By MichaelMaggs – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2704582
Actually, I was given a really nice birthday gift — two frames for things that make me happy. The first is a copy of my first letter to the editor to appear in Newsday; the second is the Dark Horse Comics ad for “Grendel” comics, where I am quoted right underneath Alan Moore.
I wouldn’t even have a copy of the Newsday letter if it weren’t for my totally awesome Longwood High School alumna, Diane Aviles Cosgrove. (This was the one about the 9/11 anniversary. The newspaper could not send me one because their archives staff was telecommuting due to Covid.) Diane thoughtfully grabbed a copy of the paper up in New York and sent it to me straight away in the mail. 🙂
Thanks again, Buddy! Longwood Lions are the best!!
So I’m a little bit of a weird guy. I had this absolutely vivid dream the night before last that I was a world-famous singer-songwriter. And I stopped into my old college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where all of my school’s deans and professors came out to greet me and invite me over for coffee. I was a celebrity.
The reason I was in Fredericksburg was to record a new version of my latest big hit at a local church — this time it would be a gospel version of the song. (Think of U2’s Rattle and Hum album.) This song, which had been my most popular ever, was called “My Girlfriend Got Eaten by a Gator.”
Here’s the thing — I SWEAR I can remember it perfectly. It’s stuck in my head. I was humming it all day yesterday. If only I knew how to write music, I’d write it down and go all the way to the Grammys.
Update — sorry for not posting a trigger warning for any unfortunate souls whose girlfriends were, tragically, eaten by gators. My bad.
Photo credit: The Howard Gospel Choir performs at Kulturama in Stockholm. US Embassy Sweden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I just found out that my recent letter to the editor about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago was printed in the Sunday edition of New York’s Newsday. You can find it right here.
Thanks once again to Newsday’s editorial staff for allowing me to share my opinion through this outstanding regional newspaper.
I got some nice news a little while ago — Down in the Dirt magazine has included my poem “The Rough, Violet Stone” in its newest anthology, entitled The Final Frontier. (The poem previously appeared in the magazine’s August 2022 issue on the first of the month.)
You can buy a copy of the new book on Amazon at the link below:
Or, you can read the entire anthology online right here.
As always, I am grateful to Editor Janet Kuypers for selecting my work for both this outstanding magazine and its subsequent poetry collections.
The Piker Press today published my humorous nature poem, “An Ode to a Would-Be Swimmin’ Skink!” For those of you who are uninitiated, a skink is a little lightning-quick iridescent lizard common in the Southern United States.) And they even ran the photo I submitted with the poem! (I snapped a shot of the little fella off Shenandoah Avenue here in Roanoke, VA.)
You can find the poem and the photo right here. Thanks, as always, to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to be a part of this wonderful community of readers, writers and artists.
Happy Monday! 🙂
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 