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
- 4 min
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
- 4 min
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
- 4 min
"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
- 3 min
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
- 4 min
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
- 4 min
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
- 3 min
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
- 5 min
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
- 4 min
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
- 2 min
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
- 3 min
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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donaldmengay
- Apr 19
- 3 min
Why the Literary References in The Lede, Including a Character Named Romeo?
One of my objections to contemporary literature on the market today, including fiction, is that it largely overlooks the literary...
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donaldmengay
- Mar 28
- 3 min
Why Choose a Dog for the Narrator, and How I Came up with the Character of Molly
In the 1990s, at the same time I was sharing work with the poet, Lynn McGee, I was teaching linked courses with a professor in the...
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donaldmengay
- Mar 24
- 2 min
How I Got the Idea for The Lede and Why It Took so Long to Write
The process took decades really. In a sense I began conceiving the story in the early 1990s. In the '80s I'd studied creative writing in...
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