Holy Smoke

HOLY SMOKE! I didn't know at the time but the year I was writing "Holy Smoke" I was writing about the last few months of a friend's life. Still editing at the time of her death, I added her thoughts and experiences. I dedicate this book to her, to what sixteen years of knowing her has meant to me (love, confusion). Holy Smoke is an expressionistic, absurdist and darkly surreal journey through the holy and the profane (smoke). As she was, she could not possibly have survived. Being doomed, I was bound to fall in love with her . . . As we move raggedly through life (which ends abruptly I am told), the gods must be laughing (if there are any). If there are no gods, they are inventing themselves (and let's hope when they grow up they learn to behave reasonably). Born in 1952, I am currently a film instructor at Woodland Community College in California, I am sometimes a painter and filmmaker in addition to being a writer of poems, novels and short stories.