The foundation of this book of essays is constructed of work that has appeared in some of the country's top literary journals, including these.

This song biography of "Sitting on Top of the World" requires research of all sorts, including journalistic. My journalism background–including as a newspaper reporter for more than a decade–has served me as I've worked on the book proposal. I've interviewed performers who have recorded versions of "Sitting on Top of the World." In this image from Zoom, I talk with singer-songwriter Chris Smither, who released a seminal version of the song in 1984 and then, in his 70s, recorded a more mature and complex version for his 2018 album, CALL ME LUCKY.

This song biography requires me to do deep dives into documents. To complete the book proposal, I've read theses and dissertations about the blues and performers who have recorded "Sitting on Top of the World," listened to hours of audio from the 1972 Smithsonian Festival of American Folk Life, and–with assistance from a folklorist who worked with Walter Vinson, who wrote the song–dug into personal and professional documents pertaining to Vinson and the Mississippi Sheiks. This image shows a copyright sheet naming Walter Vinson and his partner Lonnie Chatmon as authors of the song. This documentation served in Walter Vinson's late-in-life battle to win back rights and royalties stolen from him when others claimed authorship of "Sitting on Top of the World."

Performers have recorded hundreds of versions of "Sitting on Top of the World" in a variety of genres. I've collected more than 50 versions by performers who are famous or obscure, from the earliest days of recorded blues to soundtrack versions to go with contemporary TV shows. I invite you to listen to the variety and nuance of the recordings. Click this link to go to Spotify where I've curated a small collection of versions.

Moving through 19th-century New England to Paris and back again, THE STRANGE AND TRUE TALE OF HORACE WELLS, SURGEON DENTIST imagines the sacrifices and struggles of the man widely credited with discovering anesthesia. It is a love story but also a story of what love can't redeem: of narcotic dreams and waking insanity; of pain's destruction and what pains can never be eased. A novel that resonates with our contemporary struggles involving pain and the substances that numb it.

Finalist, historical ficiton, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award; Finalist for the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for the Novel.

"Downs tells a fascinating story in skilled, often elegant prose, and he treats all his characters with great sympathy." – Los Angeles Review of Books

A foundation invited me to Connecticut where Horace Wells lived to read from the book and answer questions from these lovely people.

Research is central to my work – even my fiction writing. That research includes books and the internet but goes far beyond those. For example, to better understand my subject in the Horace Wells novel, I spent time in Hartford, CT, visiting places where he lived and worked, examining his daybook and holding his death mask, and spending time at the Cedar Hill cemetery where he and his family are buried. I even asked my dentist, who needed to fill a cavity for me, if he would give me nitrous oxide, the gas that Horace Wells used to first experiment with anesthesia, so I could better understand its effects.

Inspired by the true-life Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, this collection of ten linked stories explores the way disaster reshapes a community over decades. Stories from THE GREATEST SHOW appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals. Three of the stories were recognized as distinguished in the Best American Short Stories series.

A finalist for the Paterson Prize in Fiction.

Foreword magazine: ''an auspicious fiction debut from a marvelously talented writer"
The Rumpus: "intricately woven"
Shenandoah Review: "beautifully written. Not a word out of place."
West Branch Wired: "These are quiet stories, in the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio, ... [with] the dramatic weight and complexity of a novel."
Colorado Review: "gorgeously captures the sweep of ordinary lives made remarkable by a tragic twist of fate."

HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY combines reportage and memoir to tells the true story of five remarkable and talented young men from Hartford, Connecticut, who pledge their lives to their hometown and who find that promise not always easy to keep.

Winner: River Teeth Prize for Literary Nonfiction
Finalist: Connecticut Book Award in Biography and Memoir.

The cover for HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY, is detail from a quilt called "All that Amazing Jazz," by Hartford, Connecticut, quilt artist Ed Johnetta Miller. Photo by John Ryan.

Selected by the Athletic sports journalism site as the one book to read about the Los Angeles Rams, HOLLYWOOD's TEAM is part history of Los Angeles, the NFL, and also part biography. It was a pleasure to assist author Jim Hock in his work to tell the story of his father, an offensive lineman who played for the Rams in the early 1950s.

"A winning new book..." – David Davis, LAObserved

"Neighbors Gathered" is an audio version of a collage essay that first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and received notable distinction in the Best American Essays series. By collage essay, I mean a single work comprised of several individual flash nonfictions. One might also think of the work, visually, as a quilt with separate swatches that make the whole.

The flash nonfictions will also appear in the podcast. The image accompanying this recording is of the dumpster that gives the podcast its title.

The recordings is about 15 minutes. It was engineered and edited by Dr. Jeremy Wexler. As author, I offer the narration.

Dr. Jeremy Wexler is a musician and composer based in New York. I invite you to learn more about him by visiting his website (click here).

Jeremy and I met in Kraków, Poland where we both worked through the Fulbright program. In this image, he explains to me the functions of his recording equipment and how he'll edit the recordings of me reading ISN'T IT FUN HOW WE SHINE. We've recorded the entire manuscript, which will accompany the podcast as an audio book.

"Jim at 2 a.m.: Something Like Opera" is a collage essay of flash nonfictions, all having to do with a Sefton Avenue neighbor whose tormented life and torment of his neighbors ended tragically.

The collage essay first appeared in The Southern Review, which also published a recorded version, performed by me, the author, and my wife, Sheri Venema. This represents an early foray into recording, so the quality isn't what I'd like. But it still offers a sense of the spirit of the podcast.

All of the flash nonfictions included here are part of the podcast.

"The Morning After His Family Buried Freddie Gray" was written in response to the Baltimore Uprising of 2015. American Short Fiction, a literary journal, asked several Baltimore writers to respond to the event, and this work was my offering. It was also my first foray into flash nonfiction, and it suggested to me that the form would be well suited to tell the tale of my neighborhood over the last several years of the Great Recesssion.

"The Morning After His Familly Buried Freddie Gray" is included in the podcast. I invite you to read the original text via Lit Hub, a nationally recognized website dedicated to literature, by clicking here.

Individual flash nonfiction essays from ISN'T IT FUN HOW WE SHINE have been published in a variety of literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Sport Literate, RiverTeeth, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, Literary Hub, and Ligeia.

To read the two essays published by Ligeia, I invite you to click here. Combined as "Night on Sefton Avenue" they tell one story of a strange Halloween visitor and another of a house haunted by a murder-suicide that happened there some 70 years before.

To read the two essays published by Baltimore Review, I invite you to click here. Open House is about a woman who moved from Big Sky country to Sefton Avenue and who longs for wide open spaces. Crossword Puzzles depicts a character kept awake by obsessions over money trouble.

To set the scene, here is a view of a house on Sefton Avenue.

This image depicts the Gagged Woman, who has become a Polish legend. The actual carving, polished and painted, can be found with dozens of other faces across the ceiling of one of the royal rooms at Wawel Castle. The legend tells of how the carving spoke to a king during a trial saying, "King, decide justly." Tormented by the brevity and mystery of her remark, he ordered the carving to be gagged.

The dragon that lived under Wawel Castle tormented medieval Kraków until the king at last turned to a boy, a shoemaker's apprentice, who claimed he could get rid of the threat. The king sent him to face the monster that had already destroyed the king's strongest and most capable knights. This legend troubles me, because though it is a tale similar to David and Goliath and other such, it made clear to me that the adults in this story are impotent and willing to send a child to certain death as if he might fix what they can't.

The legend inspired my story, "Marasek Middle," an excerpt of which is found in my work samples.

In an effort to create an exchange of literary culture, I wrote six blog posts for The Baltimore Review, where I serve on the board of directors. My blog posts, all under the title of "A Kraków Literary Journal," introduced readers to a poet, a translator, and to several significant aspects of literary life in Kraków including the city's year-long celebration of the science fiction writer, Stanisław Lem. I invite you to click the links below to read the blog posts.

Meeting with Writers and Poets in Kraków’s Literary Park
Reading a Rainbow
Notes on The Year of Lem
A Street of Verse
“The Body is the Source and the End.” Q&A with Michał Choiński, poet and scholar
“It was literature that first drew me here.” A Q&A with Scotia Gilroy, literary translator
 

The night Putin started his mad war, my wife and I joined a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd in a plaza outside the Russian consulate to protest. Within weeks, Kraków added about 150,000 Ukrainians to its population, which is generally about the size of Baltimore's. Over the next several weeks, we organized donations and other assistance efforts, volunteered to feed refugees, gave money, and generally did whatever we could to support the Ukrainians. We only wish we could have done more.

Friends in America requested news, so I regularly took pictures and offered narratives via social media, telling about the effects of the war in a city less than a three-hour drive from the Ukrainian border. This image, created by an artist to describe the plight of children forced to flee Ukraine, appeared on a Kraków doorway just a couple of blocks from our apartment.

When I agreed to teach what was likely the first-ever creative writing course offered by Jagiellonian University (founded 1364), I had no idea what a profound first class session we'd have. Four days after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I met with students on a park bench to learn from them how the war had shaken their understanding of Europe and also to try to find a reason to write and read when lives were at stake in a country next door.

Baltimore Fishbowl was kind enough to publish my essay on that moment. I invite you to click here to read it.

In 2021, when I gave the Mencken Memorial Lecture at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, it was to a nearly empty room: just a few friends in masks. But the lecture also went out to several hundred others who watched the video live-streamed on Facebook. In the talk, titled "The Babelobabuli: Notes on Mencken and Today's Muddled Topography of Literary Journals," I considered what Mencken suggests to us as readers and writers about navigating the thousands of literary journals published today online and in print. I quoted Mencken, saying that "good work is always done in the middle ground, between the theories," a line that explains our time when writers are more than ever working in a wide-open literary landscape, one that allows for the creation of new and exciting work.

The talk was later published as an essay in "Menckeniana: A magazine about all things Mencken."
 

The talk itself begins at the 2:30 mark in the video.

The Fall 2022 issue of Menckeniana, No. 227, was the last to be published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It also included my essay, "The Babelobabuli," based on my talk given for the 2021 Mencken Memorial Day Lecture.

Baltimore Magazine published "The City that Writes," short features on 13 dead Baltimore writers, written by 13 living ones. The magazine asked me to write about H.L. Mencken, the curmudgeonly Sage of Baltimore.

"What are we to do with Mencken?" became the question that fueled my writing about him for Baltimore Magazine, and which continues to fuel my interest in H.L. Mencken, an important and controversial figure in his time and now.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is scheduled to publish my 3,700-word essay on Mencken on his birthday this year, January 29. "The Last of the Menckenians" considers the dwindling numbers of the Mencken Society and explores Mencken's value in today's literary culture.

From the essay:

"Aficionados don't read Mencken because they expect to agree with him. They read him for the adrenaline jolt. That jolt hits because Mencken delivers scorn with wit and reason. He vivifies his 21st-century fans as he has ever done for readers. 'He calls you a swine, and an imbecile,' wrote critic Walter Lippmann in 1926, 'and he increases your will to live.' "

In summer 2023, I was invited to spend an afternoon talking about literary writing with high school students at the Goucher College Young Writers' Camp. After a get-to-know-you session featuring a Nerf ball and conversation about writing in general, we took a look at the essentials of plot by riffing off Kurt Vonnegut's definition: A character wants something; the character can't have it; what happens next?

Photo by Adan Rodriguez

After a four-year pandemic hiatus, the Baltimore Writers' Conference returned in 2023. This was the third time I've directed the conference, which is organized and sponsored by the professional writing graduate program at Towson University where I have taught.

The one-day conference offered 16 sessions plus a keynote address. Session subjects connected writers and aspiring writers with podcasters, a literary agent, writers of fiction and nonfiction, poets, a screenwriter, a magazine journalist, a web comic creator, a literary agent and two editors with publishing houses. We also included a session on serving as a literary citizen, led by Jake Ricafrente from the board of Kundiman, a national nonprofit dedicated to writers and readers of Asian American literature.

With a literary fair populated by journals and literary nonprofits, the conference assembled some 120 people for a day to celebrate literature and exchange knowledge about writing.

As a volunteer serving on the boards of two Baltimore-area literary nonprofits, I work to help spread awareness of literary opportunities for other writers.

Good Contrivance Farm's Writing Retreats provides low-cost space for writers who would like concentrated time and solitude to work on their craft. The farm property, in Carroll County, also hosts several craft talks through the warmer months, giving the literary community a space to gather and exchange knowledge and ideas.

The Baltimore Review publishes an online journal four times a year and compiles those into a single annual print journal. My service with Baltimore Review includes helping find judges for its contests, helping to make decisions about submissions, recommending intern candidates, proofreading, writing blog posts, and other tasks.

Baltimore's literary and artistic communities help make the city its dynamic, creative self. For the magazine BmoreArt, I had the pleasure in 2018 of writing a profile about Ed Berlin, then with his wife Ann, owner of the Ivy Bookshop. Since the Berlins showed that Baltimore would support an independent general interest bookstore, several others have opened throughout the city.

When the Maryland State Arts Council invited me to give the keynote for its annual awards celebration, the email arrived at the same time as the news that a bomb had gone off at the Boston Marathon. The timing of these two events led to a ten-minute keynote talk that speaks to the value of art in times of violence.

Q: How do you know when to stop experiencing and start writing?
A: It’s always time to sit down and start writing.

I invite you to read the full interview in which Cila Warncke and I talk about the relationship of writing and method acting, how to use tactile experience in literary writing, and my reading recommendations for writers.

Q: You reference your work history as a sports journalist and newsroom reporter. In what ways does journalism and reporting influence your approach to memoir and personal essay? 
A: I am interested in the world. I do want to know about other people. I do want to care about them and tell their stories. But I have to figure it out, as a person writing memoir, how to do both at the same time. I think all of my nonfiction work is always informed by seeking a balance of memoir and literary journalism.

I invite you to read this essay, published by The Southern Review, concerning my award-winning essay, "Answer When You Can."

Q: How did you get so comfortable in the 19th century? Do you have to research details continually? What’s the process?
A: Never ending. For this novel, the research lasted until I hit the send button and mailed it to the publisher.

In this conversation with author and acclaimed memoirist Marion Winik, I talk about the craft and art required to write a novel set in the 19th-century and based on the life of a real person.

Inspired by the third-century Chinese Art of Writing: Lu Chi's Wen Fu (translated by Sam Hamill), I explore showing restraint in works of nonfiction as opposed to telling everything up front. Norman Maclean's classic book Young Men and Fire becomes my example in this short essay, which you may read by clicking here.

In this essay, I explore the ways we can consider the essence of our subjects in nonfiction to find whatever structure will best contain that essence. Rather than work with received structures, we can rely on our own idiosyncratic approaches to literary art to create the best structures for our work.

"Subject matter suggests a shape, yes, but shape matters less than essence. Shape is artifice, a way to get at essence. Shape can be a product of my mind at work."

I invite you to read the entire essay, published by TriQuarterly Magazine out of Northwestern University, by clicking here.