Author Archives: Barry Pomeroy

About Barry Pomeroy

I had an English teacher in high school many years ago who talked about writing as something that people do, rather than something that died with Shakespeare. I began writing soon after, maudlin poetry followed by short prose pieces, but finally, after years of academic training, I learned something about the magic of the manipulated word.

Airports

End of the world texts almost always feature the end of air travel. My friend loves airports and even goes early in order to enjoy the rushing to and fro, the greetings, and the patina of travel the exhausted people … Continue reading

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Forerunners

When I was a child my foster father Cecil used to tell stories of forerunners. These were stories in which a local person would see some image of the near future. For instance, old Tyler Roach who complained to his … Continue reading

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What Do You Do for Fun?

One of my students asked me what I did with my time and he was at first aghast and then dismayed at my response. In the beginning I didn’t know he was asking about leisure time, so I described marking … Continue reading

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The Word

When I was young I thought a single word could change everything. As I grew older I thought I needed to instead depend on collections of words, and hoped that by their jostling Brownian randomness they would somehow settle into … Continue reading

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The Body Out of Control

For some reason literary treatment of the body out of control is both evocative and frequently avoided. You can think of Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel which is touted as being such a great portrayal of a disintegrating mind, but one … Continue reading

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The Hot and Cold of Aid

When I first went overseas with the volunteer organization Canadian Crossroads International (CCI)—which I wholeheartedly recommend—they put us through a highly questionable selection procedure. There are a few of these organizations that offer what people in the development field call … Continue reading

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Writing the Police

I sometimes imagine telling the story of a cop in a police state. I think about what goes on in their head, whether they are merely following orders, like the Nazi underlings claimed at Nuremberg, or whether they are so … Continue reading

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November is Novel Writing Month, Not Short Story Writing Month

As many of you know, November is the month that many people around the world put away the procrastination and pick up the pen, or more likely keyboard, to expand a late night idea into a novel. The challenge is … Continue reading

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How to Make Facebook Work for You

This is nowhere as easy as it sounds and I am sure that people more media and tech savvy than me have worked out a better way. The problem is that my facebook feed bombards me with cat videos and … Continue reading

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To Talk About Mars

No talk about Mars is complete unless you begin with Giovanni Schiaparelli and his canali. It has become almost a cliché in the field of exobiology, at least in terms of Mars, that ancient history, complete with Percival Lowell’s maps, … Continue reading

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