Writing, Language & Books

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Published, Free Short Stories - Unpublished, Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

In Which I Read My Fiction Aloud for World Read Aloud Day 2025

Posted on by David Rodeback

Today is World Read Aloud Day — or WRAD, because the world needs more acronyms. Is this the first you’re hearing of it?

The website says “15th annual,” but I first encountered WRAD only last year. I was not in time to do anything about it, except to make a note to do something about it this year.

A nonprofit called LitWorld created WRAD “to celebrate the power of reading aloud to create community and amplify new stories, and to advocate for literacy as a foundational human right.” Worthy causes all. Their website, LitWorld.org, has an activity packet, a social media kit, a web form to report your own activities, and many other resources, including links to – you guessed it – people reading aloud.

LitWorld and WRAD mostly focus on reading aloud to children, and we could make a long list of the benefits of doing that. But just between you and me, good things happen to youth and adults too, when we read aloud or are read to. I submitted a column to a local newspaper this week on that very topic. (I’ll link to it here if and when it’s published.)

To me, the obvious thing to do for WRAD is (ahem) to read aloud. So I got up early to read into a good microphone Monday morning before work, did some light editing after work, and now it’s just under 20 minutes of audio, with me reading three pieces of my own fiction aloud.

Here’s the file. It contains:

  • “Marie,” a very short, award-winning story about a seventh-grade boy who likes a girl. It’s flash fiction, about 1,000 words.
  • “I Dreamed You Died Thursday Night,” another piece of flash fiction, unpublished so far except here, in which a man’s dream one Thursday night leads to paranoia when he’s awake.
  • The (short) prologue and (short) first chapter of The Dad Who Stayed, a novella with a child’s-eye-view of growing up in a progressive university town in the early 1970s. It’s published in my 2023 Silver Quill Award-winning collection, The Dad Who Stayed and Other Stories.

Enjoy! I hope your WRAD is (I can’t believe I’m about to write this) rad.

(Can reading aloud can make you — give you? — w rizz? Don’t answer that.)

Image credit: ChatGPT4

From the Author

David Rodeback

Thanks for reading!

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And if you’re interested in my published fiction, check out my two published collections at 60 East Press.

David Rodeback - published fiction books
Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Poke the Algorithms in the Eye: Read Books in 2025

Posted on by David Rodeback

Intricate modern algorithms have their place but don’t seem to know their place. They and their faceless custodians would rule, not serve, the world, and never mind the human cost. Some people blame algorithms for our intellectual, political, and cultural bubbles and the toxic tribalism that results. I blame them too, in part.

Social media algorithms would rather please or provoke than inform or connect. They aim to keep us scrolling, clicking, sharing, flaming, and otherwise engaging at the expense of everything else, including work, family, friends, neighbors, quiet introspection, real-world compassion, and calm perspective.

Amazon’s algorithm, understandably, likes to show me things I might buy. It’s not very clever sometimes. A good half of those “We’ve found a book you’ll love” e-mails point me to books I found myself, online or IRL, and already added to my Amazon wish lists. I don’t remember the last time I loved any of the other suggestions.

High School Bands and Marching Bands, Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love (Part 3)

Posted on by David Rodeback

This post concludes my essay on writing what I believe and writing what I love. In the first part I explained that it includes reading what I love, and that includes long novels. In the second part I wrote of hope and of young people who restore my hope. This concluding part touches on my reasons for choosing to write what I write, with thoughts about my audience and what it is that I am writing.

Writing My First Novel

Something else happened in those months of filmmaking, which has directly influenced my aspirations as a writer. May I hazard another metaphor? (I can hear you saying, “Not if you’re asking permission first.” Forsooth.)

I used to prefer watching high school marching band performances from high in the stadium, where patterns and formations are clear. In making that film, I learned to prefer a closer view. Now I want to be in the front row, if they won’t let me on the sideline. I like to watch individual performers, and I think I’ve figured out why.

Hidden in Plain View

In helping to make that film, I peered behind the scenes for months, firsthand and by watching many hours of raw video footage. I discussed the marching band experience at length with dozens of students, parents, and staff, mostly one at a time. I asked ninth graders and seniors alike why they joined the band and why they stayed in it when the marching got rough. I recalled my own band experience (though darkly, through the glass of decades). And I spent hours and hours with a couple of talented filmmakers, as we tried to do justice to it all in 80-plus minutes of sights and sound and words.

You can watch our film if you wish; I still enjoy it. But the hours of interviews we left on the cutting room floor affected me as much as the fragments we could include.

In that process I learned to see beauties beneath and behind (if they are not actually not beside or before) the visual and musical beauty of the show. True, each person’s performance is part of the whole, and great effort goes into uniformity of appearance, movement, and sound. But these youth are more than cogs in a machine, if you approach closely enough and watch them long enough and strive to have eyes to see.

High School Bands and Marching Bands, Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love (Part 2)

Posted on by David Rodeback

This post continues my thoughts on writing what I believe and writing what I love. In the first part I explained that it includes reading what I love, and that includes long novels. This is partly an artist’s manifesto – that term is still too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

This is the second of three parts.

What I Believe

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that what I want to write is born of and sustained by what I believe, not just what I love. Among the many things I believe, here are the ones I most want to write about.

I believe there is good in virtually everyone. Likewise, there is a measure of evil in virtually everyone. “God and the devil are fighting,” said Dmitri Karamazov, “and the battlefield is the [human heart].”

I believe that good can and often does triumph in an individual heart and in the world at large, and it will continue to do so in the future, more often than not.

Based on long and varied experience with people I didn’t think were interesting at first, I believe there is something interesting in everyone – something worthy of our notice and reflection, and often enough our admiration.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love

Posted on by David Rodeback

A few years ago, I had some thoughts I wanted to test and refine about the fiction I’m writing. So I wrote them out. I didn’t share them beyond my critique group. Lately I returned to that writing and updated it into this essay. It’s partly an artist’s manifesto – that term seems too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

I’m posting it here in three parts. This is the first.

Am I?

Whatever you write, from fiction to commercial website copy – insert your content marketing joke here – someone has probably told you, “Write what you believe.” If not, allow me to be the first.

Write what you believe.

I don’t mean that we writers should focus all our time and energy on nonfiction which expounds and promotes our personal belief systems in political, religious, or philosophical terms. There’s a place for that. I do some of it. But today we’re talking about fiction.

I certainly don’t mean that our fiction should be tendentious and moralizing. Fiction is a well-traveled road to truth, but it loses traction when it slips from inviting us to think into telling us what to think, when the author keeps intruding to preach to us.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

My New Year’s Bookbuying Resolution — Join Me!

Posted on by David Rodeback

On Saturday, on my way out of Home Depot in American Fork (Utah), I saw something which surprised and delighted me: a Barnes and Noble bookstore. I had never seen it there before, and technically it’s not there now, but I wasn’t hallucinating. It’s “coming soon,” opening in “winter 2024.” This inspires a new year’s bookbuying resolution or two, in which I’d love for you to join me.

I welcome the new arrival. Like the arrival years ago of Home Depot in American Fork and Lowe’s across the street in Lehi, its proximity means I will expend less time and fuel traveling to Orem or wherever else. That means, in theory, more money to buy books and more time to read them. There’s a tiny environmental impact too.

Barnes and Noble American Fork - Bookbuying Resolution

However, silver clouds have dark linings. For me this silver cloud has two: one from the past, nostalgic and not very useful in the present, and one for the not-too-distant future, which you and I can do something about.

Hence my resolution. You’re welcome to share it, once I’ve explained, which is after some related chatter, er, context.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

That Teetering Stack of Books I Read in 2022 and 2023 (ish)

Posted on by David Rodeback

I love reading books, and I learned at least in time for graduate school to love writing about the books I read. My intention, these last two years or so, was to keep blogging about the books I read, as I had done sporadically for a while, then more methodically here, here, and here.

Those posts were fun to write, and they were well received, and the routine was simple enough. When I finished a book, I stacked it in a particular place until I had written about it here. Well, the stack has grown too large. I haven’t taken time to write about the books since September 2022, and I was playing catch-up then.

So today we catch up. I’ll list some books in passing but stop to chat about most, knowing full well I won’t do justice to any of them. Sixteen are fiction and grouped accordingly. Seventeen are nonfiction and separated into books about writing and others.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Books I Read Lately – Winter 2022 Edition (in September)

Posted on by David Rodeback

When I finish reading a book, I stack it on a certain shelf near my desk in my home office, away from but in sight of the UCRC, my Unconscionably Comfortable Reading Chair. There it sits until I write of it in a “Books I Read” blog post such as this one.

The stack is now 24 books. It’s getting precarious. And I should long since have written this post and two or three more like it. Such is life.

Here are five books from that stack. I’ll tell you where I found them, unless it was Amazon. I’m trying to reduce my dependency on Amazon. I’ll never overcome it entirely, I suspect, but I do love a good brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I’ll write about the others later. Ideally, sooner.

John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley in Search of American - Books I Read Lately

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

I enjoy telling people about one of my sons, who grew from a precocious early reader immersed in Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series to a mature mind preferring thick history books and great novels. One of his acquisitions was a passion for John Steinbeck’s writing.

He gave me this book as a gift. It is memoir, not the fiction for which Steinbeck is more famous, and it charmed and delighted me, page after page. It is a rambling account of his rambling journey across the United States with his dog Charley, who is surely one of the best-written canine personalities in prose. They traveled in a custom camper Steinbeck christened Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse.