Introduction

Welcome to my home page. Come up here on the porch and help yourself to some iced tea. Shoo that good-for-nothing tomcat out of the rocking chair and sit while I explain about this site: It is, and always will be, a work in progress--never finished, ever changing. I have a couple of filing cabinets in the attic, filled with notebooks and journals that contain six decades worth of memories, stories, lies, essays, opinions, and fragments of things observed, overheard, or half finished and then abandoned. Drawing on this pool of material (and new things that occur to me), I will be making frequent changes and additions to the site to keep it dynamic and, hopefully, interesting. So, if you find something here you like, feel free to drop by occasionally to look for new stuff.

The site is also a shameless exercise in pure vanity born of frustration, impatience, and laziness on my part. Like at least half the population of the planet, I aspired to the writing life--not to writing, just to the writing life. Writing seemed such a civilized way to earn one's living, and I liked the idea of being able to work on my own terms, free to choose the site and situation of my labor. My early scenario went something like this: I'd begin with nonfiction magazine writing to generate some income while I worked on mastering short fiction. I had a million ideas and figured I could soon be selling short stories at a good clip. Then, after I had become known in literary circles, I'd do a couple of blockbuster novels, sell the movie rights, move to the Mediterranean, lie on the beach in the mornings, and grant interviews to nubile young doctoral candidates in the afternoons.

I soon discovered that you could sweat bullets over a magazine article for two weeks, send it off to an editor (who only agreed to look at it on spec), and he or she might send you a check for $135.00. It didn't take long to figure out that I'd have to sell a hell of a lot of articles to afford a villa on the Cote d'Azure.

So, I settled for more secure, if less romantic, ways of paying the rent and feeding hungry kids while I continued to daydream about the writing life and to scribble in my notebooks and journals.

But when you turn sixty, your time horizon begins to shorten; things that seemed possible a few years ago begin to look doubtful. You realize that all that youthful procrastination is catching up with you, and there is not time enough left to do all you had intended to do someday. Someday is suddenly here.

That's when vanity steps in. When you finally accept that you are not likely to become a literary light, you are left with the dilemma of what to do with all the scribblings. You can do one of three things, it seems to me: You can 1) get depressed and drunk, and use all that paper to make a bonfire in the back yard; 2) store it all in hopes that one of your great-great-grandchildren will find your scratchings in the attic and discover what a perceptive and clever fellow you were; or, 3) inflict it on the entire civilized world by publishing it all on the Web.
 
I have chosen to go with option three.

The homepage name comes from the James River that flows through the Ozark Mountains of southwestern Missouri. A good portion of my adolescence was spent in, on, or near, the river. It bordered our family farm back then, but now, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, it is all--our farm and most of the James--somewhere at the bottom of Tablerock Lake. About all of the James that is still recognizable as a river is the bit that flows from Springfield down to about Galena. We lived there for six years, from 1950 through 1956, but that was time enough for the river to seep into my pores, changing forever the chemistry of my tissues, organs, and soul; filling my arteries and veins, so that even now, miles and decades away from that place and time, my heart pumps pure river water. A glimpse of a clear stream flowing over a gravel bottom still transports me--I, too, am haunted by waters. Most of the writings in the River Dreams section and some of the short stories in the Stories section relate to that time.

I wanted a site that loads quickly and reads easily, so I did not devote much effort to whiz-bang graphics or fancy layouts. The material is for reading. Where it works, you will supply your own pictures; where it doesn't, blame me and my limited writing skills.

I take all credit for typos, misspellings, and errors and omissions in grammar, punctuation, and editorial practice. Some of the many hats that one must don in a one-man operation such as this do not fit me well.

I welcome constructive feedback, both positive and negative, but please, don't take anything too seriously. While the opinions and ideas are mine, and I will gladly discuss them, I won't be drawn into any pissin' contests over them. I'm not out to offend anyone. This is fun (and therapy) for me; I hope you find some fun in it, too.