Author: Jonathan Bell

A Trip To Hell I am old now, feeble and infirm.  When I think to be-cry this I recall a peculiar visit to an old age hell I made when I was 25. Before my mother died she firmly stipulated that my blind father was never to go live with my brother Alan and his wife… Continue reading A Trip To Hell →

That Mother Of Mine In our near stygian parsonage I lived in gloom until leaving for university. That was because mother held an inviolable disesteem for the outside world.  She was instinctively a sort of mystic hermit.   Mother, Frances Eleanor Little, manifestly kept our lives shrouded in a kind of fog clinging to our old, brown… Continue reading That Mother Of Mine →

     This is an account of an actual event in my life, one that was  both whimsical and waggish.  In the telling it also becomes a commentary on the culture I grew up in, that sometimes I feel has turned sadly to shit. While trying to keep it as faithful to my history as possible I’ve taken some… Continue reading Battle at the Haysville VFW →

I'm adding a short story today, THE PRESENT.  This is my first published short story and I wrote it when I was 19.  It appeared in 1969 in COTTONWOOD, the literary journal of the University of Kansas.   It's obviously influence by Steinbeck, who I had emersed myself in for years, reading everything he wrote.… Continue reading The Present →

My few good, and far rarer,  great  teachers are dead.  O Captain! My Captain! Not once in  recollection did I thank them for their effort on my behalf.  Yet now I do reverence them and think of them with wistful regret. They gave so much and received, at least from me,  so little in return.   I recall the many bad ones… Continue reading O Teacher. My Teacher! →

Deleted scene From BEWARE OF THE DOG: Randy and Prudence are having Sunday Brunch in Long Island City.  These young Bourgeois Bohemians (BoBos) have recently moved to LIC from Manhattan. Prudence is pregnant with their first baby.  Randy is the narrator.  His point of view is that of an economic modeler and analyst.      I myself thoroughly enjoy eating at the… Continue reading Playing With My Delete-Aling →

My father, the Reverend Doctor S. Mancil Bell, wrote several hundred sermons. They were written Saturday evenings, a time when silence was commanded in the parsonage. Father was tense. We were tense. Probably even our dog of the moment was anxious. One and all waited for an explosion in his study of outrage and a… Continue reading When Darkness Came →

My business drew me to East Africa for several visits. Ethiopia was my favorite and I spent the most time there. My mind seems to connect in myth. Ethiopia always made me think of Sheba. She made me remember Solomon. Solomon led me back to Stockton, Kansas. My home town. It was settled in the… Continue reading What The Queen Of Ethiopia Knew →

From my early memories of me there is music. Father had an old record player, a large gangly box. This he replaced with an early stereophonic system, somewhat sleeker, and with a sound that filled the parsonage. When alone I would turn it up to a roar to fill the parsonage with a rampaging and… Continue reading Writer In The Shadows →

THE I AND THE SHE OF ME Picking a voice, a sex, a personality and character for the main figure of a novel is seriously daunting. Writers of great ability show us how it can be done even as we read their work with facility, oblivious to the grief they’ve poured out onto their pages.… Continue reading The I and The She Of Me →