Tag Archives: Apprenticing with the Dead

Poetry Review: A Supernatural Song of Ourselves (Bryan Thao Worra’s Demonstra)

Posted on August 19, 2015 by epbeaumont

Bryan Thao Worra. Demonstra. Innsmouth Free Press Note: I’ve followed Bryan Thao Worra on Twitter (and vice versa) for a while now. This July, I met him in person at CONvergence 2015. When I told him I’d be happy to … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the Dead – Reading Tolkien 35 Years Late (The Beautiful Endgame and the Bones of Plot)

Posted on June 25, 2013 by epbeaumont

A week or two ago, I finished reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a pro writer, there was a whole extra layer of enjoyment in the endgame, with its gorgeous structure and its alternating notes of triumph and … Continue reading →

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The real face of evil looks a lot like a garden slug, or why J. R. R. Tolkien kept the Big Bad off stage

Posted on January 28, 2013 by epbeaumont

I’m two-thirds of the way through The Two Towers, where the point-of-view swings back to Tolkien’s unlikely hobbit-hero Frodo and his faithful sidekick Sam, several days into some seriously uninviting territory. There’s a lot of rather foreboding and on occasion actively … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the Dead: A Strong Dose of Truth (James Baldwin)

Posted on January 21, 2013 by epbeaumont

The last time that I read James Baldwin’s collected essays (in the Library of America edition) was 2006, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Cleveland to see my mentor, who was active in the civil rights movement and had … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the Dead: Reading Tolkien 35 Years Late

Posted on January 19, 2013 by epbeaumont

When I was in high school in the late 1970s, everybody was reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I resisted, for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time. I think if you’d asked me then, I would have … Continue reading →

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The Independence Day post I wasn’t going to write

Posted on July 4, 2012 by epbeaumont

I am not a fan of holiday posts, but this gorgeous piece by Aker (Futuristically Ancient) took me on a literary and musical journey through the flip side of the Fourth of July and made me think about why I … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the Dead: Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

Posted on January 20, 2012 by epbeaumont

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Harley wrote at the beginning of his novel The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.” Paradoxically, we can understand the foreign ways of the past if we spend enough time with its inhabitants. … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the Dead: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

Posted on January 3, 2012 by epbeaumont

When I was 14 years old, I got a scholarship to an elite Catholic boarding school in Florida. My best friend Arlene (the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica) did too, and we were off to an adventure together across the … Continue reading →

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Apprenticing with the dead: smashing the four-dimensional fourth wall (Alexander Herzen)

Posted on December 10, 2011 by epbeaumont

My fiction is full of time-slips and voices from the past surfacing in the present, and foldings-over that make the chain of causality obscure at best. You know what they say: write what you know. The voices in the next … Continue reading →

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