DEBORAH PRUM

PODCAST-WIDOW’S BAY-TV SERIES I did not have helicopter parents. My first exposure to horror films was watching The Haunting at age ten with my father. Dear Dad, always the jokester, jump scared me at a tense moment of the movie, an event that shaved a decade off my life. Years later, in college, I stupidly re-watched the film with a bad boyfriend, who jump scared me at exactly the same mome...

PODCAST-WELCOME-A BOOK REVIEW Welcome—Patterns of the Moral Life is an elegant, succinct, and persuasive book on the importance of welcoming others. This is both a well-written argument for the necessity of welcoming others and a practical guide to extending welcome in ways that are ethical and nurturing.             The book is co-authored by Lois Shepherd JD, a professor of biomedical ethics and...

PODCAST-NICK & MIKE, NICK & ALICE MOVIE REVIEW I loved James Marsden’s performance in the TV series Dead to Me . He did an excellent job playing identical twins who had completely different personalities. The series was dark and wickedly funny. It’s worth checking out, if you don’t mind quirky and sometimes shocking material. I also enjoyed Vince Vaughn’s performance in Bad Monkey, a TV se...

PODCAST-DECONSTRUCTING UNICORNS & MERMAIDS Photo Courtesy of Alexander Grey 0:00 / 0:00 Deconstructing Unicorns & Mermaids Streetlight Magazine just published this essay. You can read it HERE. Longer version below: My four-year-old granddaughter, Zoe, and her seven-year-old brother, Henry, (names changed) live out-of-state. We often meet via Zoom. We share a screen and explore their bu...

PODCAST-SON OF A BIRD-BOOK REVIEW Writers are often advised to leave out the boring parts. Nin Andrews did just that with her memoir in prose poems called Son of a Bird . I couldn’t put the book down.             In the first poem of her collection, Andrews describes her childhood home, a stone farmhouse with a barn where the horses and chickens slept, and where the kittens and foals were born eac...

PODCAST-HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST-MOVIE REVIEW               Elle Magazine describes the Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast , as “ Derry Girls meets Bad Sisters .” I liked Derry Girls so much that I used many clips from it for a humor writing workshop I facilitated a few years ago. I loved Bad Sisters , too. The series is a perfectly structured mystery with the best ensemble...

HOPING NOT TO HAVE TO SLEEP NEXT TO MYSELF Jim & Eva’s Sunday School Class Led By Gaetano Boccaccio, Eva’s Father 0:00 / 0:00 Hoping Not to Have to Sleep Next to Myself (This essay was just published by Otherwise Engaged An Literature & Arts Journal . Reprinted with permission.) I watch a herd of disaffected teens ignore a traffic light near the high school. They slow-walk...

LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO WATCH? LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO WATCH? Here are four possibilities: Doc: a TV series A life shattering event plunges Dr. Amy Larsen into bitterness and cynicism. Played by Molly Parker, the physician becomes chief of staff at a busy hospital. For the next eight years, her acid tongue and aggressive behavior make everyone’s life hell, colleagues, family members, and even pa...

PODCAST-MONKEY BUSINESS Photo Courtesy of Jamie Haughton 0:00 / 0:00 Monkey Business (First appeared in Brevity .) I am not a monkey, but sometimes I act like one.             Over the past couple years, I’ve had to put my writing and teaching career on hold as I’ve dealt with non-negotiable demands on my life. Those events knocked the stuffing out of me and trashed my self-esteem. I wondered...

PODCAST-TASK-TV SERIES If you’ve read very many of my movie reviews, you’ll know that I love dark movies with redemptive underpinnings. The seven-episode TV series, Task , fits the bill. This crime procedural was written by Brad Inglesby, who also penned Mare of Eastown. Both series do a brilliant job of capturing gritty blue-collar life. Mare of Eastown is a mystery that keeps viewers in suspense...

PODCAST-JOYRIDE-MOVIE REVIEW I saw a snippet of Joyride on a long airplane flight. I found the film intriguing and always wanted to watch the whole movie, which I did last night with my fellow members of The Quirky Movie Club. The plot: Twelve-year-old Mully (played by Charlie Reid) is singing in a pub to raise money for a charity that benefits cancer patients, the disease that recently has taken...

PODCAST-SMOKE-TV SERIES Smoke is a nine-episode Apple TV series based on Dennis Lehane’s book, Firebug . This thriller is dark and gritty, with its main theme being no one can escape the negative effects of a traumatic childhood. All the primary characters have backstories that have left them flawed. The writing is good and is often laced with a cynical and biting humor.             As the story o...

PODCAST-NINE DAYS MOVIE REVIEW I watched Nine Days a week ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Written and directed by Edson Oda, this surreal film is set in a clapboard house in the middle of a bleak desert. In this house, over the span of nine days, Will (Winston Duke) decides if a soul will be given the gift of life. If the answer is yes, that soul will be born on Earth with all the att...

PODCAST-SLOW WALKING OUT OF BABYLON *This originally appeared in Literally Stories , an international literary journal. One day, I meet Beelzebub standing ahead of me in line at the To God Be the Glory Soup Kitchen . Bathed in the glare of the fluorescent lights that flicker above us, the man glistens. Shards of hard white light reflect off his glimmering jacket, obscuring my view. But that one gl...

PODCAST-DON’T ARRIVE BEFORE YOU GET THERE You can read this essay in Streetlight Magazine where it first appeared or down below. *** My writing mantra used to be, Fine is good enough . I made sure whatever I sent out was the best it could be. However, I worked fulltime and was the primary caretaker for three children. When I finished a manuscript, I checked for issues, then hit “send” before...

PODCAST-INSTANT FAMILY-MOVIE REVIEW Straight out of college, I took a job that gave me a year to “de-institutionalize” a group of 17-year-old kids who had spent their lives bouncing from one placement to another. My task was to equip them with the survival skills they hadn’t learned during their formative years. I was supposed to accomplish this before they turned 18, at which point the state woul...

PODCAST-PISTOL PACKIN’ MAMA Photo Courtesy of Taylor Brandon 0:00 / 0:00 Pistol Packin' Mama   Ninety-five years ago, my grandfather, Gaetano Boccaccio named my mother after his favorite Longfellow poem, Evangeline . Despite raising five children on a barber’s salary during the Great Depression, Gaetano made sure my mother took ballet, tap, and had French horn lessons. In high schoo...

PODCAST-THE GOD OF THE WOODS BOOK REVIEW Liz Moore’s literary mystery is set in 1975 at a prestigious summer camp in the Adirondacks. This place requires coed campers (aged eight through teens) to participate in a minimally supervised survival exercise. They are placed in small groups, given scant supplies, then are sent into the deep forest overnight to fend for themselves. The last instructions...

PODCAST-CODE RED Photo courtesy of Jason Leung 0:00 / 0:00 Code Red Have you ever seen Das Boot (1981), the movie about a German submarine? I don’t recommend it. I don’t remember much about it except a terrifying few moments of sirens blaring, lights flashing, and Germans screaming, “ALARM!” This scene convinced me I’d never want to set foot on a submarine.             Sad to say, I feel as if...

PODCAST-TIME OF THE CHILD-BOOK REVIEW The first half of Time of the Child by Niall Williams moves ever so slowly, taking its time to build a solid framework for the captivating events of the second half. By the middle of this novel, we readers are intimately acquainted with the village of Faha, its topography, history, climate, culture, spiritual leanings, its people and the fascinating ways they...

PODCAST-HIGH POTENTIAL-TV SERIES Lately, I’ve been seeking low key, stress-free entertainment to keep my mind off reality. The television series High Potential fits the bill. Single mom, Morgan Gillory (played by Kaitlin Olson), is an exuberantly inappropriate savant whose antics get her in trouble with employers, past husbands, and the law, most specifically the LAPD, where she works as a janitor...

PODCAST-IF I EVER DIE My father often started his sentences with the phrase, “ If I ever die…”             I never corrected him. I didn’t say, “Don’t you mean, when you die? You understand that dying is inevitable, right?” Instead, I wondered how he thought his life might play out. Did he believe he’d be carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot like Elijah in the Bible? Probably not. My father’s...

PODCAST-DADDIO MOVIE REVIEW Daddio is shot in the interior of a yellow taxicab on its way from JFK Airport to an apartment in Manhattan, a trip that normally takes forty minutes, with traffic. However, on this late night, the trip stretches to one hour and forty minutes because of a car accident. Not only does the movie take place in the cab, but most of the shots are of Clark (Sean Penn) and his...

PODCAST-IRRESPONSIBLY GROWN POTATOES 0:00 / 0:00 Irresponsibly Grown Potatoes Recently, as I walked through the produce section of a grocery store, I passed a sign that said, “Responsibly Grown Potatoes.” Naturally, I began to imagine “Irresponsibly Grown Potatoes.” Would they be grown by a chain-smoking farmer, one who flicks his carcinogenic ashes on the crop? Or, maybe they’d be raised by a...

PODCAST-WHEN TO CARE AND WHEN NOT TO Photo Courtesy of Omar Salom 0:00 / 0:00 When to Care and When Not To (This essay originally appeared in  Brevity .) My vocation is writing, but my avocation is painting, mostly portraits. I belong to a Facebook group dedicated to showing the work of artists who are trying to create loose watercolor paintings. Members range from people whose pieces could be...