Crítics Matiners

Stories, essays, and poems accumulated during the author’s journey in writing over fifty years, spanning the Vietnam War, a legal career—time was spent staring out the windowand imagining—and travels either alone or with his wife and family, and observing people, places, and things around him, including a freight train crossing a street intersection in a west Texas town.

STORIES: The eleven stories are short, self-contained works that can be read at leisure and in no particular order without missing anything. There is a wide variety of genres (Sci-Fi to suspense), settings (Southern back roads to a desert wasteland), and viewpoints (intimate first-person to remote third person). The Vietnam-era related works were almost all written in draft form while the author was in Vietnam or shortly after his return home.

ESSAYS: Each of the essays or creative nonfiction stories has its genesis in something the author experienced or learned from his family history. The fictional stories derive from a mélange of the author’s life experiences and observations and thinking “what if,” including a dystopian story set during a future world-wide pandemic in which only the wealthiest survive.

POEMS: The poetry is mostly short, easy-to-read free verse, examining the mysteries of life and death and who we are through the use of irony, paradox, whimsey, allusion, and allegory.