Category Archives: Short Stories
Criticism and the Common [sic] Core [sic]
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA certainly are “common,” but in the pejorative sense of the word. They are received, vulgar, uninformed, base, mediocre, pedestrian. One would expect that people putting together a single set … Continue reading →
A Brief Explanation of Everything. You’re Welcome.
NB: The following is a story. It is not fact. It is based in facts, yes, but it is entirely speculative. This was an exercise I set myself to create a myth that is completely consistent with current scientific understandings. … Continue reading →
Why Science Fiction Is Impossible: A Science Fiction Writer’s Confession
When I was still a child, I fell in love with Sci Fi. I stayed up nights devouring stories and then novels by Asimov and Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Poul Anderson, Frederick … Continue reading →
The Coring of U.S. K-12 ELA Curricula
My entire adult life has been spent sometimes as a writer and editor for various textbook companies and sometimes as a high-school teacher of English, Speech, Debate, Theatre, and Film. For much of my life, I ran a development company … Continue reading →
CENTCOM DX’s T’s KPIs
Being a lesson on muddying the waters to make them look deep. . . . “Management consultants steal your watch and then tell you what time it is.” –Martin Kihn “Let me speak, for a moment, from a 50,000-Foot-Perspective,” said … Continue reading →
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping, or Welcome to the Panopticon. A Report from the Near Future
The utter subjugation of the populace didn’t happen via secret police and mass executions as in Stalin’s Russia. No, it was much more subtle, occurring bit by bit, drip by drip, a boiled frog phenomenon. It all started, seemingly innocently, … Continue reading →
If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?
Back in 1969, fifty years before this now, Kurt Vonnegut is publishing Slaughterhouse-Five. (How exciting!) In 1984, I am watching the film version with my then girlfriend and wishing that we had our own geodesic dome on Tralfamadore just like … Continue reading →
Bésame Mucho
Once upon a time, there was a Princess and a frog. And the Princess said, “If only you would kiss me, I would turn into a frog too and be most beautiful and slithy and live in the cool, dark … Continue reading →
Bobu and the Missionaries
Three Mormon missionaries came to the hermitage of the monk Bobu. They wore clean white shirts and $10.00 ties from Walmart. Each was extremely earnest and exceedingly well scrubbed. Though no more than nineteen or twenty years old, they referred … Continue reading →
The True Gospel of Thomas the Apostle | by Bob Shepherd
Prologos This is the true book of Thomas the Apostle as spoken unto his scribe regarding those events to which he was witness in his youth. Let none be tempted by some fleeting end to take away from the words … Continue reading →
Bob Shepherd | Praxis 