Brian Kenneth Swain

I’ve had a wonderful time interacting with the students of John Damaso’s Honors English class at Brophy Prep in Phoenix, AZ. There are about 100 students in 4 classes, and they have spent the past month reading and studying World Hunger as part of their project on human dignity and world food supplies. I’ve had an opportunity to answer numerous questions on this site, as well as participate in a series of Skype video-conferences with the classes, during which we discussed aspects of the novel, as well as broader GM issues and the writing/publishing fields. I thank the class for their time and energy and look forward to many more such opportunities in the coming ...

Introduction For as long as I can remember I have had a problem with books. As a general matter, I love them, and, as a consequence, cannot bear to part with one once I have it. This state of affairs has been true pretty much since college, and to prove it I still have every book I ever bought back in those heady days, including many engineering books now so hopelessly outdated[1] they may as well be about how to manufacture rope from indigenous grasses. Doesn’t matter though; I still have them on my shelves and that’s the important thing. But my inability to discard books is not, strictly speaking, the topic of this essay. I mention it only to provide context for the somewhat dense and recondite material to follow.  The task I have ...

~ Reflections on Just How Badly the Game of Golf can be Played ~ I have wanted to write about my views on the game of golf for quite a long time, but always resisted for one reason or another, not least because so many others more talented than me have made such a splendid job of it[1], leading me to conclude there was little I could add to the dialog. Only then, after a bit of reflection, I finally hit upon a potentially unique angle. Most of the extant golf literature is either about the subtle grandeur of the perfect drive, or the mist floating gossamer-like across the first green at sunup, perhaps even the ephemeral serendipity of a hole-in-one. But no one, so far as I could tell, had ever reflected (at least not publicly) on just ...

Anna thrust her key into the apartment door lock, turning it with a crisp clicking sound that reverberated through the dark empty hallway. She was still breathing heavily from climbing the stairs to her fourth-floor Manhattan walk-up. It didn’t help that she had stopped at the store on her way home from work, and was carrying a bag of groceries in addition to her backpack. She pushed open the heavy steel door with a creek, while dexterously guiding Max the cat to one side with her Reebock-clad right foot. It wouldn’t do to have him slipping out into the hallway, as none of the sixteen cats currently living in the building were allowed there according to their owners’ leases. Kicking the door shut with a thud behind her, she dropped ...

“You’d’ve thought he’d make it home…just this once. He could have at least managed that.” Sarah sat on the edge of the ancient living room couch, her torso leaned far forward, her face in her hands. She sobbed quietly as her Aunt Anne Marie sat by her side, one reassuring hand massaging her niece’s knee. It had just passed six in the afternoon, and the musty, high-ceilinged room still resonated slightly with the last chime of the antique mantel clock. The just-slightly-off-center ticking and resonant striking of the walnut Ingraham had been a part of the house’s rhythm for longer than anyone could remember. “He’ll come. You just wait and see,” Anne Marie said reassuringly. “He’ll come.” “No…he won’t. I ...

Terry Peterson’s life has been one of non-decisions. At fifty-four, most of what he is and does and believes are the results of either decisions he has failed to make or, in a few cases, decisions someone else has made on his behalf (whether he wanted them to or not). Like, for example, his marriage, which commenced shortly after his fortieth birthday and not because of some mid-life epiphany or even any greater-than-average concern about what the neighbors might think of a forty-year-old guy living by himself. As it happened, Clinton Pendergrast was his boss at the time—an executive of that all-too-common sort who deeply, viscerally enjoys terrorizing his employees—and he (Pendergrast) had also happened to have a daughter, Renee, ...

A dense cloud of highly radioactive steam billowed and swirled around the broken reactor pipefitting. The technicians before the control room’s large monitor struggled to see through the cloud, occasionally catching glimpses of the labyrinthine mass of stainless steel tubing surrounding the main vessel. The observers could also clearly hear over the intercom the piercing hiss of steam being forced out under high pressure from the fractured valve joint. The control room foreman turned for a quick glance at the radioactivity gauge in the center of the Vessel 3 control instrument cluster – thirty seven thousand rems, more than one hundred times the fatal short-term dosage for a human. As he turned back to the monitor screen, the hissing ...

If the sun were any brighter, fiercer, Randy would have spontaneously burst into flames and been reduced to cinders right there on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Hendricks’ house. As it was barely two in the afternoon, he supposed he had nothing but increasing quantities of this inferno to look forward to in the coming hours, for each of which he would be compensated but seven dollars and fifty cents, scarcely sufficient to justify the apocalyptic discomfort, certainly not enough to pay for the skin grafts he felt sure would be required by the end of the week. It was barely mid-May for Christ’s sake and already Baxter had endured twelve mind-numbing days of above-one-hundred-degree temperatures with above-ninety-percent humidity, ...

There comes a point in every man’s life when he realizes he is nothing, or if not nothing, then very little. Ephraim Pontoon realized this earlier than most, primarily because of the considerable help he received from his parents, who offered continuing reminders of how unlikely he was to amount to anything. It wasn’t that they hadn’t liked him as a child; they’d expended much of their parenting energy inculcating this view into all four of the Pontoon children. Ephraim, being the oldest, had simply heard it the longest, and had taken the message to heart well before entering secondary school. “Ephraim,” his father intoned over countless dinners, “the last thing this world needs is more people, particularly people like us. ...

Adriana brought flowers because she knew he liked them. Bennett wasn’t gone yet, but he soon would be, and the calculating pragmatism they shared told her to bring them now, while he could still enjoy them. Chrysanthemums were his favorite and she had been fortunate to find a dozen — enormous and explosively red – at the Shop-Rite just off Chambers Street. Down just a block from the store, trudging through the gray Manhattan bitterness toward Mt. Sinai Hospital, she had been accosted by a haggard homeless woman to whom she had given one of the flowers. Even better, she had thought coming up in the elevator to the fifth floor ICU, eleven mums and a gesture for a total stranger, apt metaphor for what would soon be Bennett’s ...