January 2010

Feature Articles

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Selection of feature articles by Rick Skwiot “Paradise Sought,” Washington magazine. “Instrumental to the Music Industry,” Washington magazine. “Pride Goeth after the Fall,” St. Louis Magazine. “A Writer’s Life: Real but Unlikely,” Washington magazine. “How to Protect Yourself from Hearing Loss,” St. Louis Magazine. “Food for Thought,” St. Louis Magazine. “Stemming Health-Care Fraud,”Washington University Magazine. [...]

Inside the Bad Knee and Sick Mind Of the Arthroscopic Surgery Patient

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By Rick Skwiot (First published in PortFolio Weekly) My first mistake, fueled by youthful enthusiasm, was sprinting up the stadium steps with another lineman on my back. Conditioning, we called it. My second critical mistake, some three decades later, was going into arthroscopic knee-surgery without the benefit of sedation. Some might see a masochistic pattern [...]

A Hot Town for Adult Pleasures

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By Rick Skwiot (Published in PortFolio Weekly) KEY WEST – One popular Key West bumper sticker, usually seen on rusty pick-ups with Monroe County, Florida, plates, reads, “If it’s the ‘season,’ why can’t we shoot them?” “Them” being the snowbirds and tourists (known locally also as “tourons”) who flock to the island in winter, crowd [...]

Unsolicited Reader Comments on Christmas at Long Lake

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  “I have enjoyed Christmas at Long Lake hugely…It is beautiful and cleanly written, and I admire it not only for its use of language but as well fro the ways in which, within the framework of the narration of events of a couple of days, it works outward to create a larger thematic universe [...]

On Writing Christmas at Long Lake

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What Rick has to say about writing Christmas at Long Lake: A Childhood Memory While writing Christmas at Long Lake I re-read José Ortega Y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, which helped me clarify what I was about in my memoir: depicting the last vestige of a folk culture as mass culture attained supremacy. [...]

Critical Praise for Christmas at Long Lake: A Childhood Memory

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  “Rick Skwiot works his own magic…As usual, Skwiot’s writing is sure…And his tale has a gritty, blue-collar cachet…This is good reading.”—Kansas City Star “Skwiot’s vivid descriptions of the physical and emotional landscape of this environment are poignant, entertaining, and instructional…There is magic in this depiction of a setting and a way of life that [...]

Assateague Island

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By Rick Skwiot (Published in PortFolio Weekly) If you want to get an idea what this land looked like before English ships arrived, go to Assateague Island—though you won’t see Assateagues, Gingoteagues, Pocomokes, and Nanticokes, the Algonquin-speaking peoples who lived there then.  But you will glimpse one of the last significant stretches of uninhabited coast [...]

On the Firing Line: The Blackwater Training Center

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On the Firing Line: The Blackwater Training Center in Moyock teaches soldiers, cops and ordinary citizens how to keep their edge in an increasingly dangerous world. By Rick Skwiot (Published in PortFolio Weekly) The most dangerous creatures lurking in The Great Dismal Swamp that spans the Virginia-North Carolina line are not the 600-pound black bears, [...]

Killing Mother

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By Rick Skwiot (First published in PortFolio Weekly as “The Crossing.”) The call I’d been waiting for came in the middle of the night, waking me from a dead sleep. “This is Nurse Something-or-Other from the Good Samaritan Home…Your mother’s passed away…Would you like to come down and see her?” I’d been wanting her to [...]

Blood Simple

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A St. Louis novelist reflects on ancestry, race, DNA testing and hyphenation From St. Louis Magazine July 2008 When I was a child, we lived on a lake in rural Illinois outside Granite City, where my father worked at a steel mill. But on weekends he was outdoors. In winter, ice skating on the frozen [...]

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