Category: story

  • Good Neighbors

    A Christmas Story, excerpt from Death and the Dream. After Christmas my Aunt Muriel and I walk through the barren park on East Fifth Street in New York. It’s not much of a park. We have to stop every six feet or so beside one of the rotting wooden benches to let my Aunt Muriel…

  • Way to Heaven

    An excerpt from Death and the Dream by J.J.Brown, deliciously dark short stories for Halloween. It’s so unnaturally quiet inside the old wood shed. And dark. It’s so completely dark inside, even at midday, as if buried above ground. Spiders hang in front of webs so thick on the dirty windows that they form lace…

  • Our Own Personal Fiction-Just Don’t Call it News

    Storytelling is great as long as you call it fiction, when it is. Is it truth or fiction? Is it news or a calculated lie? The question of fact or fiction can be a painful one for the storyteller in the family, and my family has been blessed with storytellers. I love to tell a…

  • Why I Don’t Like Pink

    Certain colors mean a lot to me. Like the special blue gray that was the color of mother’s eyes, that is a good one. But I don’t like pink. It’s all because of a strange episode involving a snapping turtle. Where I grew up in the foothills of the Catskill mountains, the ponds were filled…

  • New Role Models for Girls Everywhere

    Who are your role models? This year, girls and women have three wonderful new role models. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to, and accepted by, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, for non-violent peace work in women’s rights. The peace prize is awarded based on Alfred Nobel’s criteria to those “who shall have done the…