Author Archives: Brian

Quarterly Round-Up of Work: Winter, 2013

By Brian | Published: March 25, 2013

I’ve been a Quentin Tarantino fan since seeing Pulp Fiction in high school, and his latest, Django Unchained, blew me away. I was surprised to find so much of the press around the movie focusing on its historical accuracy, or shocking use of racial language. I think Tarantino is underrated by critics because he trades [...]

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Recent Writing about Books

By Brian | Published: December 13, 2012

I considered spinning this post as an end-of-year “best of” list, but I’ll be honest – I’ve been delinquent (alright, lazy) in updating this blog and so have a backlog of pieces to share. Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to write several pieces about great books and authors: Three Square Meals [...]

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Wordsprouts: Dad Bloggers Talk Food, Family, and Writing

By Brian | Published: October 10, 2012

I’ll be reading and—oy veh—talking about writing and fatherhood at Word Sprouts, The Park Slope Food Coop reading series, on Friday, October 19th, at 7pm. Come learn what made this once avowed child-hating baller the poster-boy for stay-at-home breeder-dom I am today. It’s a sad tale. As if that’s not enough, headliner John Donohue, who [...]

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A Bit of Byrne Criticism

By Brian | Published: October 10, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I saw David Byrne in Philadelphia, playing with St. Vincent and an eight piece brass band. They tore through the majority of their new album, Love This Giant, and took turns doing solo pieces re-worked for brass. (The highlight being an awesome rendition of the Byrne/Eno song “Strange Overtones” from [...]

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Investigations into Inspiration

By Brian | Published: May 29, 2012

Whenever I talk with a writer, I talk process. How people make art fascinates me. I’m not one of those struggling authors searching for a magic bullet, some tip or secret that another writer’s stumbled on that I too can adopt and so solve all my writing woes. (And I tell ya’, woe is is [...]

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Three Pieces about Jonathan Lethem and Talking Heads

By Brian | Published: April 21, 2012

Try pinning yourself to the page; you’re a moving target. As much as I love some of my parenting essays on HuffPo and Prospect Heights Patch, they are so anchored to particular parenthood moments that looking back on them I feel displaced from the internal struggles they document, like how when I calm down from [...]

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Three Interviews: Gates, Lethem, and Tillman

By Brian | Published: January 31, 2012

A few years ago, for my graduate school thesis, I interviewed novelists David Gates, Jonathan Lethem, and Lynne Tillman about how their reading informs their writing. I was motivated the advice – attributed, though I have no idea if this is true or not, to Jonathan Ames – that a first time novelist should select [...]

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Interview with Novelist Helen Schulman

By Brian | Published: August 9, 2011

The free-ranging discussions of writing workshop sessions, while helpful in so many ways, sometimes frustrated me. If the conversation circled back on itself, or went all over the place, I’d leave with pages of disorganized notes on my piece and no clear idea of where or how to begin processing the criticism. Not so in [...]

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The Playground Enforcer

By Brian | Published: July 7, 2011

Yesterday, my Fathering from the Hip column “Playground Justice” looked at my son’s Lil’ Napoleon complex – his insatiable desire for other kids’ toys, his insistence that it’s perpetually his turn. But on the unruly rubber-safety surface of the playground, especially one littered with communal toys as ours is, the aggressor can quickly become the [...]

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There Goes the Neighborhood

By Brian | Published: June 5, 2011

Once Williamsburg was news. When I moved to NYC in ’99, the Brooklyn neighborhood made headlines, as long squatting artists found themselves priced out of their warehouses by a wave of gentrifying youth – some of whom I knew. A friend lived on some dark, deserted street in an old spice factory. The place still [...]

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