Over the last week, I’ve been giving considerable thought to the themes that motivate my forthcoming novel: the far-reaching (and often unrecognized) effects of war and the importance of storytelling in the process of healing moral and psychological wounds suffered by both individuals and the body politic. Partly, this thought is prompted by my teaching duties: my AP Lit classes are beginning our unit in war literature, while my Senior English classes will study Homer’s Iliad

When scrolling down the homepage of my site, some of you might wonder about the grainy photograph alongside the quote from Tim O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead.” That’s me on the left, back before I began sporting a beard nearly a decade ago. On the right is Tom Myers. We’re both playing hooky from our jobs. I was teaching at Green Bay West High School at the time, Tom was an Associate Professor of English at St. Norbert College, and we’d decided to take in an event of som

My AP Lit students have just begun reading one of my favorite novels, Don DeLillo's White Noise. After reading the first fifty pages, many of them are left a bit befuddled. While some of their head-scratching is understandable given that we've just returned from a long holiday break and their noggins are still a bit cloudy from a combination of time off and the revelries in which even many top-flight high school students engage while on vacation, a fair portion is due to th