I
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.
I mapped it out it out to the last detail: victim, weapon, motive, opportunity, covering the tracks, the whole meticulous homicidal mess. In the end, it went almost exactly according to plan, and was a complete success.
Almost.
Fortunately for all concerned, the murder was fictional: the plot of a mystery novel, Murder Among Friends, published in 1993. It sold out two printings; that was the successful part.But I’m remembering it now for a different reason. One of its central plot elements, indeed the underlying theme — the reason I wrote it —was not the homicide, but the context: the murder was a portent, a forerunner of a larger real-life conflict, with a grim history and an ominous future. I could feel it coming then; two decades later, long after the novel ended with this part unresolved, it has moved from fiction to perilously close to fact.
Its history was our American Civil War (the first one): my tale was set in one of its most contested killing fields, the splendid and fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, near Winchester. The Valley was fought over repeatedly, and changed hands between Blue and Grey dozens of times. Today its landscape is dotted with battlefield memorials and war cemeteries.It seemed an apt locale for early warnings of a potential repeat catastrophe. Further, the Valley had the other feature I wanted for my story: a long and turbulent, but little-known Quaker presence.
Category Archives: Novels & other Fiction
A Sparkling New Podcast on “Tell It Slant” – The Biography of Chuck Fager
Announcing A Brand-New, free podcast, now online at the link below:

Continue reading A Sparkling New Podcast on “Tell It Slant” – The Biography of Chuck Fager
New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online
Can art help us get through (and bear witness in) hard times?
The Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts (aka FQA) thinks so. A new example is the just-published issue of FQA’s journal, Types & Shadows, (aka T&S) online right now, right here.
T&S was launched in 1996, the new issue is #101, for Autumn 2024. In its pages you’ll find stunning color photography, striking poetry, a historical Quaker novel excerpt and arts reporting.
For a long time, Friends shunned the arts (more on this here, in FQA‘s free online pamphlet Beyond Uneasy Tolerance ).
But today the arts seem to be thriving among us.
This is always good news. (An archive of earlier T&S issues back into the 1990s is here.) But it could be even better in hard times. In 2017, FQA sponsored a project, “The Art of Fearlessness,” as a response in a similarly turbulent period. Continue reading New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online
Bambi Revisited: Much More than Disney
The Guardian
Lucy Knight — March 21, 2023
Gunned down and burned by the Nazis: the shocking true story of Bambi
Walt Disney made Bambi a cutesy schmaltzfest for kids. But the original story was a brutal allegory by a Jewish writer who later fled the Nazis. As the character hits 100, we look at the iconic fawn’s extraordinary life.
When Love Island stars Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury announced that they had named their daughter Bambi earlier this year, it caused a bit of a storm. Some approving fans claimed to be “obsessed” with the name, but Atomic Kitten star Kerry Katona called it “ridiculous” (although she later apologised).
“Is it good?” An Asian-American Writer Stands Up for Imaginative Freedom
From: “Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’”
“If I were a debut writer, I wouldn’t have dared to write this book,” Rebecca F Kuang says from her home in Boston. Then again, she wouldn’t have been able to. Her new thriller, Yellowface, could only have been written by an author familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the publishing industry: its petty politics, its bad faith, its best intentions gone hilariously awry. Continue reading “Is it good?” An Asian-American Writer Stands Up for Imaginative Freedom