Blogs & Features

To say that Ralph Steadman has a distinctive style is a bit of an understatement. Primarily an illustrator and cartoonist, Steadman started his career in the 1960s and soon established himself as a counter-culture icon [...]

M.C. Escher created Puddle in 1952. It is a woodcut that depicts a simple scene - a puddle in the middle of an unpaved path through the woods. The path is muddy, you can see footprints heading in both directions [...]

Back when I was in High school I took an art history class where we studied the life and works of artists from the Renaissance to the modern period. I had by this time already fancied myself an artist [...]

The smell of cut grass, hot dogs, and mustard. The sound of leather on polished wood. The taste of cheap beer drunk from plastic cups. Bunting hanging from the eaves, a marching band, and jets flying in formation. The sound [...]

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has for a long time been my favorite “ghost story,” not solely because of how well it is told, but also because it is, for me, a “local” tale, in that I grew up in [...]

In the darkness, you were dreaming. Dreaming and that is all. You did not see what you thought you saw. You did not experience what you thought you thought was so real. There was not a shape, a shape in [...]

The bridge is tall and narrow. It is made of metal constructed in a triangular pattern with rivets visible along its span. The suspension tower rises far into the sky, and the cables that keep the road suspended are thick, [...]

The blood elevator scene, sometimes called the ‘river of blood,” from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a horrifying and disturbing image in a film full of horrifying and disturbing images.  Upon watching it the scene produces in many – myself [...]

I sit and look out my back window into the yard behind my house. It is large and full of trees; a combination of fir and pine and aspen. On this day, early in the morning, it is cold and [...]

When I was about to launch my book tour a few years a­­go, I was nervous about reading in public—I tend to mumble, and have never been a good storyteller [...]