As I finished a short essay on the California-Nevada high desert – with a nod to the Paiute cowboy with whom I once worked cattle there — I came across a possible market: the Watershed Review at the California State University at Chico, 200 miles north of our ranch. Its editors wrote that they are “on lands that were originally occupied by the first people of this area, the Mechoopda, and we recognize their distinctive spiritual relationship with this land. . . .”
I have seldom been so sure that the editors of a magazine would like what I wrote. I was right: My Among the Bristlecones is out today. Read it ==>at Watershed Review

As fall approaches each year, I begin thinking about putting out grain and suet for the birds; there is still time to help some of them fatten up for a long flight to winter quarters. And every year I chafe at having to wait until the nearby bears hibernate.

When Masque & Spectacle, a twice-a-year literary magazine now in its tenth year, announced its interest in “prose that has a sense of poetry,” I sent them a little essay on the problem. They liked it: My “Bears and Birds” is now published online. You can read it ==>at their website

The Writer’s Workout, which publishes a quarterlyliterary journal titled WayWords, has published four of my stories and essays in the last four years. When they invited submissions for a new edition on the theme “nostalgia”, I cast my memory back three-quarters of a century to the year I worked harder than any time before or since — and had more satisfaction and fun.

You can buy and read it in print or Kindle at ==>>Amazon
Or can more easily (and free!) read it at my blog, ==>>right here

I don’t think I’ve written a story that I really liked that proved so hard to get published.

I offered “Rattlesnakes” to a dozen magazines that focus on nature or the cowboy West, all of which have published some of my work. Most declined with their usual tactful language, but one was more candid — and appalled. “Well told,” the editor wrote, “but contrary to everything we espouse.”
Finally The Museum of Americana accepted it. You’ll understand why it was a hard sell when you read it ==>>there:

I don’t often write to a magazine’s prompt, but when Flora Fiction Literary (which had already published several of my pieces) announced a theme of “festivals,” maximum 1,000 words, I was fairly confident they’d like my recollection of picnicking at Tanglewood.
They did; it’s out now. You can buy the whole paperback (!!) ==>>here   or at Amazon

or you can read my story  ==>>right here.

Occasionally memory goes back to 1966-67, when the Alicia Patterson Foundation sent me with the family to study the governance of two great rivers that traversed both Communist and non-Communist nations — the Danube and the Mekong. Although my reports dealt with government action, there was time to marvel at how people lived — and in Cambodia, one unique way they fished.

Wanderlust Journal liked the account; you can read it ==>there

I’ve tried writing for magazines that only consider 50-word or 100-word pieces, and have even had a few published, but it’s not a genre I’m fond of. Even 500 words usually seems too constrained, but occasionally I find a topic that doesn’t need more than that — and then Panoply is the one I try first. When I sent them a piece on taking my bird feeders down, they accepted it in a short three weeks, telling me (what a writer loves to hear) “The writing quality itself is the winner in this piece.”
You can read it in Panoply, ==>>here

 

     Inlandia, A Literary Journey, invited narratives celebrating what they call the “Inland Empire” of Southern California.

   I had such a narrative almost ready to go: Remembering when my college buddy Bill and I visited Death Valley on New Year’s Eve of 1951. As we clambered around an unusual formation of sand dunes, studying the patterns, the wind began to rise.

   We were in for a gritty evening. I called it “A Lesson in Dunes.” It’s out now; read it here ==>>