Benjamin Roesch

Author: Benjamin

  • Post #131: A Podcast for Your Pleasure

    So, yes, I haven’t written a new post in an embarrassingly long time. It’s not because I don’t love you. Getting an MFA and starting a new podcast has kept me sadly away from this platform, and from all of you fine people. I did want to let you know,…

  • Post #130: Authority Zero Needs Ya

    Had he never married my step-sister, I likely never would have met Jason Devore (center, dark tank top), or  become so well acquainted with Authority Zero, the Arizona based band he leads. Authority Zero delivers a blistering brand of punk/ska/ heavy metal (check out this video of them doing “No…

  • Post #129: The Seeker

    For the first time I’ve been reading Irving Stone’s biographical novel Lust for Life, about the life and artistic pursuits, and general unwavering obsessions and fanaticism, of the great Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, whose work is so known and admired it’s almost a cliché. Van Gogh was an artist…

  • Post #128: Some Thoughts on Ann Patchett

                In Ann Patchett’s 2011 novel State of Wonder, she demonstrates how a writer can, and should, manipulate time to inform a reader’s experience and focus her attention. In a rudimentary sense, time = importance. By skipping briskly through time, for instance, a reader subconsciously…

  • Post #127: Me Vs. Batman

    Hello! If you’re still out there, thanks for hanging in and many apologies for the radio silence. I’d make excuses, but you don’t care. The leaves are changing here in Vermont and our yards are dusted with crispy little piles of orange and purple leaves. It’s six-thirty right now and…

  • Post #126: Nothing Is Ever Really Lost

    Greetings to you, faithful and patient readers! I’m excited to share the good news that I have a new essay on Eudora Welty up over at The Bangalore Review. It’s an in-depth look at Welty’s amazing short story “Music From Spain.” Give it a peek. Many thanks to them and…

  • Post #125: From the Files of the Wonderful and Utterly Unexpected

    So, here’s a strange one. I won an award. For my writing. That’s never happened before. It wasn’t a major award or anything, and I suppose it’s obnoxious to gush, but I can’t deny it feels good to know some people out there noticed. It’s a piece you may have…

  • Post #124: Dallas Buyer’s Club

    I know I’m not alone when I declare it was a great year for film this past year, and I’ve been seeing more movies than usual, trying to make my way through the Best Picture Nominees . I’ve seen everything but Philomena and American Hustle. I caught The Wolf Of…

  • Post #123: Well Said, Eudora Welty

    Some lovely passages from Eudora Welty’s memoir to brighten and enlighten your day… “The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily–perhaps not possibly–chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often…

  • Post #122: Andrea Barrett

    A recent book that blew my mind was Andrea Barrett’s collection of stories called Servants of the Map. It was one of those books that, while reading, I could feel burrowing into my writer’s subconscious, re-arranging the wiring for what’s possible and what I want to be able to do…