Guilt over the people I neglect when I write dogs me. In only one place in my entire life, have I ever seen the problem of guilt over literary self-indulgence dealt with honestly; for that reason I hold Anne Lamott dear. In Bird by Bird, she elaborates on her own experience of writer’s guilt generously. Anybody else out there also trying to climb out of the hole of guilt?
Joe C. Smolen, AKA L.W. Smolen is an Oregon Coast writer of insufficiently exaggerated notoriety. Never having been arrested, he lives with his wife Sherrie and the ghost of their black, Standard Poodle Rico Suave in a really pretty good, Prairie Style house they built themselves. Since the Literary Magazine Fleas on the Dog of Kitchener, Ontario has permanently stopped accepting submissions, in order to read L.W. Smolen’s 2021 short fiction, A Real Guy, you are referred to joecsmolen.com. Some of L.W’s other, subsequent short fictions are archived at Olive Tree Review, Ginosko, Cardinal Sins Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, Wilderness House and etc. Kirkus reviews once interpreted his work favorably.
