Writing
I’m a writer in addition to being an editor and creative consultant, and I began being published when I was a young spoken word poet. Now I write and publish memoirs, travel and music stories, fiction, and meditation pieces. Click on any entry below or on older entry pages to read my work!
The Night We Opened for Ray Manzarek of The Doors (Music Memoir)
I was standing alone in the center of the Mystic Theatre, a 500-capacity venue in Petaluma, California. It was empty, and my band and I were waiting to load on stage to do our sound check. The old vaudeville hall was still reverberating from the headliner who had just...
Tedium 9 – Delilah Reveals the Truth (Fiction)
Jarette was speeding into the desert night with Delilah beside him. It was dead silent except for the sound of the truck’s engine and its wheels on the asphalt. Headlights struck the darkness illuminating a sliver of road ahead with nothing but sand, rocks, and scrub...
The Rescue and Flight of Dr. Theussical (Memoir)
There was a horrific thunderstorm in New Orleans the spring night that Dr. Theussical fell from his home. The fall was twenty feet down from a nest built inside a rain gutter. He survived by landing in the soil of a potted palm tree on our back patio. My girlfriend,...
The Sweat Lodge in My Backyard (Memoir)
When I was a kid, I always tried to be normal but it never worked. My lemonade stand was in the center of a cornfield. I often threw the football to myself. And sometimes I wore a Mustang Ranch T-shirt to school, which was a gift my dad acquired from an infamous...
The End of Being Human (Music Memoir)
I woke up in an empty room on a hardwood floor with a terrible hangover. It was 11:00 am in Amsterdam. The door rattled and was followed by a loud knock, knock! A shallow silence followed. Then, knock, knock, knock! “Gentry! Get up! We’re waiting!” The voice was...
I Befriended a Venomous Viper in a Mayan Cave (Memoir)
It was dawn on the eastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula, and I looked out over the Caribbean in front of me. The sun was rising as the full moon was setting. Those two magnificent orbs in the sky at one time didn’t occur often, but today had a strange kind of magic....
Mrs. Kiffmeyer, My Piano Teacher (Music Memoir)
I walked up the driveway to the top of a small hill in a nice, Minnesotan neighborhood every Thursday afternoon for piano lessons. When I reached the top and opened the front door, I slipped into another world. A curtain drew back from my black-and-white movie and...
Tedium 8 – An Apocalyptic Roadside Attraction (Fiction)
It was macabre. A gothic children’s exhibit. A series of blackened and burnt structures had been cobbled together to form a methamphetamine miniature golf course in the center of nowhere. Jarette was on the border of Utah and Nevada just outside the small town of...
My Barefoot Piano Punk Video Life (Music Memoir)
The studio was filled with smoke. My eyes were red and puffy and each breath I took was filled with leftover joint fumes. I stared through the haze over the microphone into the engineering booth waiting for talk back. “That was dope.” “Really? You thought so?” I...
Learning Loneliness in Track Town (Memoir)
I stood in his bathroom with a bucket, a sponge, and a can of Ajax bleach. He was in the doorway. A strange and angular-looking middle-aged man staring at me through wire-rimmed glasses with a lascivious grin. My skinny body was nervous, but I was broke and I needed...