Happy Poor Fern’s Day
Today, as every schoolboy knows who went to school in Sedalia, Mo.–Queen City of the Prairies, Gateway to the Ozarks, the State Fair City–is Poor Fern’s Day. What? You’ve never heard of the holiday? Have […]
Author: Con Chapman
I'm a Boston-area writer, author of The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees pennant race, and 50 books of humor including "Scooter & Skipper Blow Things Up!" by HumorOutcasts Press. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe among print outlets. "Rabbit's Blues," my biography of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington's long-time alto sax player, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019, and was named Book of the Year by Hot Club de France. My young adult novel, "Kimiko Chou, Girl Samurai," was published by Atmosphere Press in 2021.
A Session With My Poetry Coach
It was the form letter that sent me over the edge. “Thank you for submitting your poem to plangent voices,” it began. “Please excuse the standardized response, but due to the volume of god-awful submissions that we […]
Nazi Muff-Diving: It Coulda Happened Here
With the summer solstice comes, predictably, summer, and with summer comes beach reading. A by-product of the season’s lower intellectual standards is that one’s literary risk-reward ratio expands exponentially, the way pole vaulting records were […]
Scooter & Skipper Celebrate Father’s Day
The landline rings, waking me from the first of my two (2) allotted naps of a Sunday. I normally wouldn’t pick up–it’s usually a local financial planner who drops the call as soon as he […]
Horrid Case of Plant Abuse Cracked When Wife Goes Away
WESTLAND, Mass. For Martha Colburn, summer is the time for her annual “getaway” weekend with girlfriends, even if Crevasse Ranch, her favorite spa, has imposed “social distancing” measures to comply with state health mandates. “I […]
Jack Garner, Parsley Farmer
Jack Garner gazed out over the farm that had been in his family for three generations and let out a sigh of exasperation. He looked down the rows of curly leaf parsley, often used as […]
For “No Punc” Writers, Way to Women’s Hearts is Paved With Semi-Colons
NEWTON UPPER FALLS, Mass. It’s a warm summer night in this highly-educated suburb of Boston, but Evan Dwinnel is feeling a distinct chill in the air, and not from the ancient air conditioner at the bookstore where […]
Golf Tournament to End Golf a Hit With Anti-Golfers
PLAISTOW, New Hampshire. It’s Monday, the day when golf courses are traditionally closed but available for charity golf tournaments, and the Dun Roamin course here is the scene of a recent entrant in a crowded field that […]
God of the Universe Next Door
Edgar Allan Poe’s prose poem “Eureka” suggests that if there are multiple universes each has its own god. Review of “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” by John Tresch, The Wall Street Journal […]
A Divine Gate-Crasher at the Antique Car Show
Saturday morning: my usual routine–swim, town dump, dry cleaner, coffee–is brightened today by festivities on the lovely greensward that graces the center of our town, like so many others in New England. I don’t mean […]