Category Archives: Days

Bright Lights Film Journal (October 20, 2019) I have no memory of 1956, the year of the first broadcast, but from that time until 1980 (with the exception of the MGM Children’s Matinees in the early 1970s), Oz belonged to … Continue reading →

Eclectica Magazine, July/August 2019 “Thus, do we live, forever taking leave.” —Rilke I am sentenced to that place some call the “prison house of language” and through its bars, I see you out there. I want to explain what happened, … Continue reading →

Presented at the Freud Museum, London, interdisciplinary conference on Nostalgia,  (9th March, 2019):  https://www.freud.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Nostalgia-Conference_Poster.pdf ) Of all the photographs in the old album, this is the one I return to again and again. A girl hugging her dog on a … Continue reading →

During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, … Continue reading →

Side Door   (Streetlight Magazine, December 2017) “Why not sense that, incarnated in the door, there is a little threshold god?”  (Gaston Bachelard) I’m a man now and I can’t help but feel grateful to Deanie. She was fighting for … Continue reading →

Set 50 years in the past, Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Detroit, is an act of public memory, an excavation of a brutal history specific to the time and city in which it took place, yet recognizably American, immediate and unfinished. But … Continue reading →

Jackie Kennedy, Ray Bradbury, Suburbia, and Me (Belt Magazine, July 21, 2017) “Drifting snow, a near whiteout. Left at the end of our street and then over two blocks to a particular mailbox, the one next to the big highway … Continue reading →

All the World Is (Not) a Stage  (Huffington Post, November 11, 2016)

“It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.” (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899) Read Sally Draper at the Ford Rotunda (published by Eclectica … Continue reading →

Belle Isle Aquarium is the winner of Streetlight Magazine‘s 2016 short fiction contest. Nina held her hand as they moved slowly through the large gallery beneath an arched ceiling of sea-green glass tiles. From one walled tank to another, each … Continue reading →

Huffington Post (25.07.2017) Each parting in life diminishes us in some measure, and we may pause to wonder if it is the last one. Time and events will intervene sooner or later. Accidents. Illnesses. Cells age and mutate. Breaths become … Continue reading →

“In an unknown world at the edge of Detroit, there is a green diamond ablaze beneath the sky. We, the young ones in this place of pattern houses, call it the Lighted Field.” Read more of this sketch, one of … Continue reading →

The homemade docks at Sugarbush promise firm ground, a stone path leading to a cottage, a mother and father, a clearing in the trees, and a gravel road back to town, because life asks to be lived. (read more) Sugarbush … Continue reading →

This essay appeared in Belt Magazine (July 22, 2015) and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. For an easier read, please see PDF version here: Of Rumour and Riot

This essay appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal (November 4, 2014) American Dreamers: Badlands’ Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis If Badlands is a story outside history, as Malick claims, then Kit is bent on creating one for himself, a history of … Continue reading →

(A version of this essay appears in the Fall 2014 Issue of Cobalt Review) http://www.cobaltreview.com/ Born in Detroit in 1892, my grandfather was a Tiger fan all his life. For more than half of the twentieth century, decade after decade, … Continue reading →

(Editorial piece for the Detroit News: August 13, 2013) “Where was I? I was living quietly in the suburbs, officer! This bankruptcy business has nothing to do with me!” This is the answer I once might have given, before I … Continue reading →

Q&A for Ford Road Ford Road, a new Michigan-based novel by historian Amy Kenyon, tells the story of Kay Seger, a historical consultant to a Los Angeles film company who abandons her career to return to her childhood home in … Continue reading →

Amy’s new novel, Ford Road, is now available.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

My grandfather, Fred Granger – third from left and wearing the black hat – in the old wildcat stands at Bennett Park.  With all good wishes to the Detroit Tigers at the start of the 2012 season.