A surprise piece of news this morning: I received notice I’d been selected as a finalist in the 2015 Maine Literary Awards Nonfiction Short Works category. The excerpts below – that made up the submission – are part of a larger piece called The Christmas Letters. Some of you are familiar with another excerpt from […]
Tag Archives: Writing
September
30
The Nathan Brothers: Pas de Deux
posted by Adam Nathan
Adam: In a single word please describe the experience of others watching you dance. Entries longer than a single word will not be given consideration. Chris: Amusement. Adam: Yeah, that works for me, too. I think if I’m on the outer edge of a dance floor and somebody who knows me that isn’t dancing is watching they might be […]
September
01
The Nathan Brothers
posted by Adam Nathan
Adam: I want to run an idea by you. Let me know when you have a minute. (No hurry.) Chris: Hi Adam. Here I am. On the same page, so to speak. It’s an odd sensation. Very… public. I feel self-conscious, as if you had just invited me up on to a stage where you’ve been […]
December
24
The Christmas Letters
posted by Adam Nathan
I look up from the black and white laptop screen and the whole world is in color just like in the Wizard of Oz. It’s 10:30 at night and I’ll be writing for hours, but I don’t care because I’m ready now. Daddy’s home for Christmas.
December
06
My Father
posted by Adam Nathan
It’s as if he thought his children would be strangers he would get to know, by and by, from across some agreeable paternal divide, from over the upper edge of the New York Times, or through the rear view mirror angled cleverly into the backseat.
November
25
The Well-Tempered Songbook: #50 – Mannish Boy, Muddy Waters (The Last Waltz)
posted by Adam Nathan
And every time I play it… the same roosters skidding across the roofs of tin shacks, the same moss-gurgling pools of testosterone bubbling up in the bayou, the same thrashing moonshine alligators, the same women stumbling through the burning corn, tearing their cotton dresses and chasing Waters’ unstoppable, slow-moving, black locomotive.
November
17
First Kiss
posted by Adam Nathan
If you had to watch all the first kisses of your entire life replayed on a videotape you’d really start to notice the problems piling up. Maybe you have a better reel than I do, but without the soft head rush of a good kiss to mask over the problems, the issues really start to […]
October
24
Photographs and Memories
posted by Adam Nathan
An image of a man and his things – his precious, precious things – an image viewable only at a great distance, from some vast outer space of feeling, from the vacuum of gain and loss, from the breathtaking cosmos of memory with all its twinkling stars of ephemera.
October
21
Beautiful Girls
posted by Adam Nathan
I remember wondering how anyone so young and pretty could ever end up looking old, like women that were actually old or even like my mother who was just a little bit old. I just couldn’t see the facial life trajectory to get from here to there. That a twenty year old girl could ever […]
