Spoken into the Ether

Remember the GEICO caveman ads?Here’s the very first one:It premiered in 2004, and this story you are about to hear, “The Lost Diaries of a Cro-Magnon Man,” was written right around that time. So credit where credit’s due — thank you, GEICO Caveman! Also, thank you to Michael, who accepted this story for In Posse Review.For this episode, my audiobook recommendation is not for a book but for a narrator — Grover Gardner. For the last few months, I’ve been listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third

Bonus alert! Before reading the short story “Little Things” for this episode, I read from an essay I wrote about the concept of home. This was for Kartika Review, back in the spring of 2010, which is all about my first house:That is the Alpha Tau chapter of Phi Kappa Tau, which still exists today at 106 The Knoll, Ithaca, New York, and indeed it was my first house, as my formative years were spent in an apartment complex. And the reason why I read the essay first is because this short story is

Number five is a bit of a change of pace: three flash fiction shorts for the price of one episode. They are as follows:* Bird Figurine* 1950* Confessions of My Wart, Which Is on My Right Foot, Second ToeI don’t have a picture for the third story, but maybe that’s for the best. Does anyone really want to see a photo of a wart, even if it’s a talking wart? Maybe especially if it’s a talking wart…My audiobook recommendation for this episode is Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out.I still can’t get over

Remember DVD extras? Or maybe I should ask…remember DVDs? Those shiny discs that looked like CDs? (If you now ask what a CD is, then I’m really in trouble.)Anyway, this is what I consider this episode to be — a DVD extra equivalent for my first novel, Everything Asian. Initially it was the second chapter, featuring a wayward mother and daughter team of shoplifters who ran into the Kim family. As you can imagine, hijinks ensue. This chapter was ultimately jettisoned, but now it lives on here on

Welcome to the third episode of Spoken into the Ether. “Translation” was published in Hyphen, in its Fall 2008 issue. The artwork for this story was created by Chloe Bonfield, who’s done amazing things since!When I first saw this illustration in print, I found it rather frightening and didn’t quite understand why Chloe had taken this dark path. But then I thought about this story from the mother’s point of view and it made startling sense. Before this art, I thought my story was mostly funny,

Welcome to the second episode of Spoken into the Ether, the podcast disguised as an auditory delivery mechanism for my short stories. “Limits,” published in Carve Magazine, dates back to 2008, but its origins go back even further, to the early spring of 1990. It involves two seniors in high school, Joe and Chuck, and their collegiate futures. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue. And if you get to the end, you’ll hear a different kind of admission from yours truly.On a slightly related topic, I have an

Today, my two mystery novels, Skin Deep and Deep Roots, are living their second lives with a new publisher, Datura Books!To celebrate this grand occasion, I’ve decided to put out the first of a dozen of my short stories in audio form. It’s titled “The Suitcase,” and it was published in 2015 by The Margins, the magazine run by the Asian American Writers Workshop. The best way to do this was through here, Substack, via their podcast wing. I’ve decided to call the podcast Spoken into the Ether,