I’ve been trying to write this memoir for a long time: Schools of Thought: My __ years in education. The number in the blank keeps growing. Today it’s 70. For one thing, too many of my school memories are painful. Which means it would be helpful for me to write about them, yet also difficult. Sometimes I summarize my story as “All Schools Suck,” which is true, but what do you say after that? Each school sucks in its own way. Can I squeeze 250 pages out of this monumental yet trivial conclusion? Talking about how each school sucked in […]
Squirrels in the Wall A Novel in Stories By Henry Hitz Now Available Squirrels in the Wall is a collection of interspecies voices that presents a unique and darkly hilarious blend of human and animal perspectives from a single setting on a Wisconsin lake. The stories provide a kaleidoscope of heartbreak among both human and animal characters as they confront abuse and death. This is a novel about the humanity of animals and the animality of humans.
Announcing a new Webinar series by soon to be best-selling author Henry Hitz on “Embracing Your Inner Asshole.” Your first installment of this ground-breaking webinar series is yours absolutely free if you’ll share your email with me so that I can inundate you with special offers, modeling the essence of my lesson. The three essential premises of this world-changing webinar series: All writers are assholes. You have to be an asshole to think that anyone would really want to read your insignificant narcissistic scribblings. If you want anyone to actually read your shit, your primary job is not writing but […]
Stories about working-class organizing. Do you have a story? About rank-and-file organizing in the unions? Organizing the unorganized? Working-class community organizing? Organizing in working-class schools? Please comment on this post with your contact information if you do have such a story. Ken Epstein https://www.oaklandxings.com and I are editing an anthology of such stories called Solidarity Forever. So far we have stories from Walter Riley (Boots dad) about organizing in the auto and steel industry, from a Black Panther Party community organizer, from a leader of last year’s West Virginia teachers strike, from a leader of the Teamsters for a Democratic […]
White Knight or how one man came to believe that he was the one who caused the San Francisco City Hall killings and the Jonestown Massacre — A novel by Henry Hitz In 1977, a fireman named Dan White saved a woman and her babies from a fire in the Geneva Towers apartments in San Francisco. It is this scene which opens White Knight, the story of one witness to that fire, Barney Blatz, and his entanglement with the political and personal catastrophe which followed. With the November, 1978 Jonestown Massacre of 912 people and, nine days later, White’s murder of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city and Barney unraveled. “There’s a bumper sticker that reads ‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from […]
It was a beautiful event commemorating Jonestown on November 18. If you click on the picture above, it should take you to the video. I’ve already characterized Jonestown in a previous blog entry as among the worst incidences of white supremacist genocide in our country’s blood history, perhaps comparable only to the Trail of Tears which killed 4000 Cherokees. This conclusion is based on the results of the Jonestown tragedy, 918 killed, 70% of them black. Results reflect intentions. But this understanding doesn’t explain what happened. Calling People’s Temple a cult as People Magazine did recently doesn’t explain anything either. […]