No PLACE Like It Too
To reverse the truism There's no place like home to something like Home is no-place is useful in privileging people and connections,...
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donaldmengay
Apr 24 min read
No Place Like It
I've been traveling lately, one of my favorite things. To pack and go; interrupt the routine; experience something new and unexpected; be...
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donaldmengay
Feb 145 min read
Love and Roses
The words alone are cloyingly sweet, two categories so multiple they're almost meaningless. Like "god," "woman," "man," and "love," each...
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donaldmengay
Jan 304 min read
Tropically Yours
This isn't a post about palm trees, parrots, or torrential rains, but it could easily involve those things. It isn't about The Tropics...
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donaldmengay
Jan 164 min read
A Different Kind of Afterlife
Aristotle argued that tragedy, a story ending in a death, unlike a comedy which ends in a marriage, is the more impactful of the two...
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donaldmengay
Dec 31, 20234 min read
Here's to a Happy, Customary New Year!
Champagne, confetti, feasts, favors, noisemakers, sparklers, fireworks, kisses, and more, including more champagne, nothing of which has...
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donaldmengay
Dec 15, 20234 min read
Can You Please Put That in Writing?
The interesting thing about humans, especially from the perspective of a post-humanist like me, is how they work against their own...
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donaldmengay
Dec 1, 20234 min read
The Funny Thing About Nonviolence
To say "I stand for nonviolence" or "I am nonviolent" are fightin' words. Immediately after the words are uttered the devil's advocate...
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donaldmengay
Nov 20, 20234 min read
Anonymity Machine
Of the 1800-odd poems that Emily Dickinson penned, only ten made it into print. Melville died in obscurity in 1891, forty years after the...
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donaldmengay
Oct 31, 20234 min read
Cryptic Lit
Literature has been obsessed with its ability to confer immortality for millenniums. There are countless examples over time, including an...
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donaldmengay
Oct 11, 20234 min read
An Author in Search of an Audience
It's one thing to turn out a novel, another to land a press to publish it, and a whole other enchilada to find a readership. For the...
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donaldmengay
Sep 25, 20234 min read
"Eating Well" Revisited
In 1989 Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy sat down for a conversation on the subject of the subject, that is the entity taken for...
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donaldmengay
Sep 3, 20233 min read
Publication Day!
Sixteen years in coming! I thought it'd never arrive. By another math it's closer to forty-five. I determined to write novels in 1978 in...
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donaldmengay
Aug 18, 20234 min read
L'Animal C'est Moi – Derry, Derry, Derry-Da
To grasp the difference between a humanist and post-humanist mindset, you only need to read a recent article by Jonathan Franzen in The...
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donaldmengay
Jul 31, 20234 min read
Dense and Denser: Reading as Mirroring
Among the many benefits that novel-writing affords a person is an awareness that a literary work is a mirror of sorts, reflecting as much...
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donaldmengay
Jul 21, 20233 min read
Plot Mania!
When I first started teaching, decades ago, I followed the convention of many of my colleagues and read in class for the story. I...
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donaldmengay
Jul 4, 20235 min read
Some Things Resist an Outing
When I set out to write the novel that became The Lede to Our Undoing, I wanted to revisit the experience of falling in love with another...
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donaldmengay
Jun 19, 20234 min read
Homer was the First Post-Humanist (In Print)
Although I suspect the idea was circulating around the entire ancient world, in and outside of what we call Greece today, it was Plato...
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donaldmengay
May 31, 20232 min read
Race in The Lede, Part 2
To say diversity is strength isn't a mere meme or pretty saying. It's a fact. Genetically speaking a heterogeneous line is a healthy one;...
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donaldmengay
May 10, 20233 min read
Race in The Lede, Part 1
The Lede is based on several assumptions linked to race. One of the most fundamental is that the US has never been a real democracy, and...
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