Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

In three days I'm about to start teaching a whole new crop of high school kids the craft of writing. This will be around the twentieth time. 20 X 25... that's 500 students. That's a humbling thought because every time prior to meeting my new students, I feel that I'm not qualified to teach them. I do write and I have been published professionally (as an educator) and as a freelancer in real magazines and periodicals, but -- lest it sounds like I'm exaggerating -- my total published pieces are around 10. Maybe a dozen but definitely not twenty. When I was a kid I wanted to be a writer. I read this book from Scholastic Press (I think): The Mystery of the White Oak. Not a famous book by any stretch. I'm sure it's been long out of print. Years ago, I Googled it. It took me a lot of fancy Boolean search logic before I finally found it. Anyhow, it was the first chapter book I read if you don't include Bobby Coon by Thorton Burgess. Interesting sto...

My wife will tell you that I'm a very unemotional person. When our kids were little and the Disney cartoon Beauty and the Beast had just come out, she nicknamed me "Beast"; my son who was born shortly after the movie came out on video -- and who saw it about a hundred times -- was lovingly nicknamed "Beast Jr" by his mother. All this is to say, that I don't cry much. Although, I have to tell you, I did a lot of throat clearing the first time I saw Beauty and the Beast, Free Willy and Homeward Bound. Well, in the last several years, I've cried at several scenes in books: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow The first book, I can't tell you about because it would give away a serious spoiler. Do yourself a favour: Read it. Especially if you're a male. It'll make you ashamed of our gender and wish you were a better man (pardon the cliche). The sec...