On a Blue Moon

  “Kill one person and it’s a tragedy; kill a million and it’s a statistic.” I found myself thinking of this quote after our A Few Good Pages reading session last week. Some stories end in the reading circle, but many of them follow me home. We had read The School (1974) by Donald Barthelme and The Wrong Seminar (2025) by Scott Monson. During the session, The Wrong Seminar stood out to me for its sharp humor and modern tone, yet it was The School that stayed on my mind the next day during a long drive. At first, The School felt light and conversational, told in a casual voice with dark humor. It doesn’t really have a protagonist. The narrator, a teacher, speaks as if we’ve stepped into the middle of a conversation. The story feels intimate and detached at once. Its ending offers closure without clarity, leaving you wondering what it is really trying to say. That same casual tone reflects the indifference in how the narrator talks about death, and it might have been contagious...

Dedicated to: “Meena Kolnad”, " A few good pages " and to the community we have become.   I definitely did not expect that an ant I saw in Tunisia on a retreat a little over a month ago would end up being the subject of discussion in the "short story" club that I’ve been attending religiously every Thursday. My dad used to read me short stories and poems when I was a child. That’s how my love for literature began, and I started writing poems at a young age. I wrote a few short stories in school, but poetry always felt more natural to me, so I kept returning to it, experimenting with different forms over the years. I first experienced publishing in newspapers, then on websites, and eventually a few books. In recent years, my relationship with writing began to shift. As my reading turned more toward psychology and spirituality, I found myself journaling more often, writing for no audience, with no intention of publishing. It became a mindfulness practice and a way...