Daily Orange Q-and-A

The Daily Orange, the independent, student-run newspaper at Syracuse University, published a Q-and-A article featuring me and my book, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. I’m honored to appear in the pages of the newspaper, which I read religiously as a staff member at SU. You can read the piece here.

 

 

Standard

Poecabulary: One Year Later

One year ago this week, I published my wacky passion project, Poecabulary, which is a minimalist poetry collection and conceptual art piece. To celebrate, I am running a free Kindle book promotion through Friday, June 5. If anyone would prefer a PDF version, please email me at ffd1284@gmail.com.

Poecabulary front cover.

This project originated with some wordplay and Photoshop edits back in 2013. And while the collection contains fewer than 700 words (across 190 pages), it took me more than ten years to curate, select, refine, and edit the 156 word pairings that comprise the book.

Here’s the back-of-the book description:

Poecabulary is a minimalist poetry collection that blurs the line between vocabulary and verse. Words appear in unexpected pairings, creating connections that surprise, challenge, and invite reflection. Each combination is a deliberate act of linguistic play, where alliteration, sound, appearance, randomness, rhyme, and meaning collide.

The author explores how similar or opposing words interact, encouraging readers to discover their interpretations and associations. Both a playful exercise and a meditation on language, Poecabulary celebrates the power and flexibility of words.

This collection will resonate with language lovers, poetry enthusiasts, and anyone curious about how words shape meaning. Sample pairings include Autistic/Artistic, Diffident/Different, Lonely/Lovely, Perfection/Perception, and Reject/Respect.

Standard

Six-Month Reprieve

I’m brimming with gratitude for having wrapped up a great week. On Monday, Memorial Day, my memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood, was officially released by Toplight Books, an imprint of McFarland & Company. My Goodreads Giveaway continues until June 1 if you want to try to win a copy.

You can also find the book on Amazon or Bookshop.

On Tuesday afternoon, I had my sixth-month follow-up appointment with my neurosurgeon, Dr. H. I received the radiologist’s report early Tuesday morning when I logged into Upstate’s patient portal. Upon reading that the tumor had grown measurably since the last scan in September, two thoughts swam through my brain—can the radiation oncology team hit the tumor with another round of Gamma Knife radiosurgery, and, if not, can I schedule my brain surgery over the summer so it won’t disrupt my busy work schedule that ramps up during the fall semester at Syracuse University?

To make it to my appointment, I had to take a Centro bus out to the Upstate University Medicine office in the Township 5 shopping center in Camillus, which is an Area 51-sized example of suburban sprawl.

Here are the quotes from the report that troubled me:

There has been “significant interval enlargement of the sellar and suprasellar mass consistent with known craniopharyngioma. On the current examination the mass measures 2.3 x 1.4 x 2.1 cm. On the comparison study dated 9/3/2025 the mass measured 1.6 x 1.1 x 1.7 cm.

“. . . There is worsened superior displacement and compression of the optic chiasm right worse than left.”

Yet when I see the always sanguine, gum-snapping Dr. H., he’s unruffled by the latest report. Dressed in a green, plaid flannel shirt and brown khakis, he takes a seat and explains that he reviewed the previous scans, lined everything up, and determined that the tumor has not grown significantly. He tries to allay my fears by giving me a detailed description of how different MRI machines or variations in the “slices of images” can affect the interpretation of the scan.

My two latest MRI scans appear on computer screens. The image on the left is from September, and the one on the right is from this May. The craniopharyngioma is the circular object in the middle of the brain.

Dr. H’s recommendation: Wait and see. Reschedule another MRI in six months.

I have no objection to this approach, and I left the office feeling grateful for another six-month reprieve—another half a year to live with no scheduled surgical intervention.

At the same time, I know the tumor isn’t sitting idle. It’s in a constant state of aggregation, growing steadily as the fluid inside expands, and at some point, it will likely provoke headaches and double vision (more than just to my extreme right).

But I try not to fall victim to the futility of worrying about my health (easier said than done).

##

On Friday, Upstate posted my conversation with host Amber Smith on the Informed Patient podcast. I much prefer pitching questions instead of fielding them.

I’ve conducted countless interviews in my role as a video producer at SU since 2007, and it’s definitely weird to be on the other side, to be the interviewee and not the interviewer. But it gave me a warm feeling of nostalgia for my radio days (circa 1996-2006).

Standard

Book Release and Giveaway

Today marks the completion of a dream with the publication of my memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. To celebrate my publication date, I am running a Goodreads giveaway. It ends on June 1, and I’ll be giving away two signed copies of the book.

I don’t have much experience with signing books, but I have never understood the practice of authors crossing out their printed name when they sign their books. To me it feels like defacing a work of art.

Standard

Silly Little Adventure of Earth

I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and I wanted to share one more passage that stood out to me. In this scene, during a massive going-away party for the character Japhy, held in Berkeley, California, the narrator, Ray Smith (Kerouac), reflects on people and existence:

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought was this and that, ain’t this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”

My battered copy of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

Standard

My Books Arrive

My first shipment of books from McFarland & Company arrived yesterday. I’m so glad to see this book become a real thing—not just an idea in my head—because the project took more than 10 years to complete.

“Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood” is a coming-of-age story about identity and self-acceptance, told through the lens of my journey to adulthood after being diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 15 years old.

The contains about 40 black-and-white photographs, medical records dating back to 1984, and diary entries from the early 1990s and beyond. It’s also loaded with sports and pop culture references from the ’80s and ’90s (e.g., Doug Flutie and The Cure).

I’m scheduled to give a reading at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, at Jervis Public Library in Rome, where, as a youth, I discovered my love of books and was introduced to authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I hope I won’t be so nervous that I ramble and babble.

A certificate for my participation in a summer reading program at Jervis Public Library in Rome in 1976.

Standard

Writing in the Morning

An early spring morning.
The refrigerator hums
in the kitchen
and sunlight streams
into the living room
while I write in a spiral notebook,
the sound of the ballpoint pen tip
scratching against the white paper.

In this moment
I realize the act of writing—
the mechanical activity
of jotting down
one word after the other,
leading to verbal connections
and accumulated sentences—
delights me and uplifts my spirit,
even if the words I write
add up to nothing.

And I will keep writing
without knowing the result,
having no expectation of success,
because I must—
because stopping is impossible,
since writing was never a choice for me—
instead, it’s an involuntary exercise
with the pen moving across paper
providing evidence of my existence.

Standard

Buddha Bliss

I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while because I had to finish proofreading and indexing my forthcoming memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. Producing a back-of-the-book index was an exhausting, onerous project—especially because my book is loaded with medical terminology and pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s. Example: U2 see also The Edge, The Joshua Tree, Mullen, Larry Jr.

My messy index in process.

To avoid having to write an index for my follow-up memoir, I’ll make it 97 percent fact and 3 percent fantasy and call it autofiction.

But that’s not why I wanted to post today.

I am re-reading the autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I think is a very underrated Kerouac work.

One passage caught my attention, and I wanted to share it.

The narrator, Ray Smith, has traveled from the industrial wasteland of Los Angeles to Riverside, California, as he tries to make his way to North Carolina to visit his mother. He camps for the night in a bamboo grove.

“And then I thought, later, lying on my bag, smoking, ‘Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.’”

And I know this is a quote I will revisit during stressful times. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Standard

Jenna Finds A Dog

My former Metro Networks’ colleague Terry Rousseau has written a middle-grade novel entitled Jenna Finds A Dog.

Jenna Finds a Dog cover.

I’m looking forward to reading it. In the biography, Terry mentions residing in an isolated village in the New Mexico mountains. And he cracked me up with this line: “His most recent hobby, not by choice, is cutting down the hundreds dead trees on his property with his electric chainsaw thanks to prolonged drought and bark beetles.”

Standard