The creative impulse comes. How do you know that it has to be a poem? What if it’s a piece of sculpture? or a novel? You are the instrument of the language. How do you know that the meaning of the impulse can’t be accomplished by going in and doing the dishes?

PIECES is not a collection of poems, not a collection of stories, but PIECES of the craft in fiction, poetry, essay, and workshop.

The essays in this book center around the questions of love, wisdom, and knowledge through time. What is love in the twenty-first century? Is there a wisdom to marriage? Are our bodies “naturally wise?” What is the nature of orgasm? The meaning of sex? The author uses examples from ancient authors such as Pascal, Marcus Aurelius, and Descartes to clarify the issue of the decay of wisdom and the relation of nature to science, while at the same time drawing on present-time social and cultural mores to ask the enigmatic question-Is there such a thing as “stupid wisdom?” This is not a how-to book on becoming wise, but an interrogation of human wisdom in the Anthropocene. Will the “speaking word-ape” destroy itself as well as the environment it lives in?

Maxine and Berle are on the run with Charlie’s half a million dollars and a shrunken head in a wooden box. Charlie wants Maxine back, he wants his money back, and he wants Berle dead.

The Widow (La Viuda) is ninety-two years old. She lives in a house filled with photos and coins, jewels and a sable coat. Aware that her memory is failing but burning with desire to record the story of her life on paper, she hires Gabriela, a ninteen-year-old Mixteca from Mexico. Gabriela is one of the few survivors of a massacre and treacherous journey to El Norte. Gabriela and the Widow is a story of chaos, revenge, and change: death and love, love and sex, and sex and death. Gabriela seeks revenge for the destruction of her village. The Widow craves balance for the betrayals in her life. In the end, the Widow gives Gabriela the secret of immortality.

Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long-time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns – which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.

Valley Boy is Book Two of Remick’s California Quartet Series.

Ex-mercenary Hank Mitchell is doing five years hard time for stealing a tubful of women’s underwear. In prison, Mitch falls like a bear for his young cellmate. In the prison library Mitch discovers the novels of Genet and the Marquis de Sade and is inspired to write his own story – a saga of family deception, sexual obsession, and contract killing – to atone for all the blood he’s spilled. But now his family wants him out and back in the killing game, a game where the rules are about to change.

Jack Remick is a writer and teacher. As a young man, he worked as a tunnel rat, a bus driver, a house painter, a social worker, a retail clerk, and waited tables at the UC Berkeley Men’s Faculty Club where he rubbed shoulders with Nobel Laureates, scoundrels of all stripes, and international students from a dozen countries who taught him about cultural relativism. Remick learned to write poetry from J.S. Moodey in Centerville, California, and from Thom Gunn at UC Berkeley. When he was young and idealistic, he dropped out of Cal-Berkeley and spent time chasing rainbows in South America. When that didn’t work out, he repatriated, got degrees from Berkeley, San Francisco State University and UC Davis where he specialized in romance linguistics and French literature. At Davis, while studying with Jarvis Bastian, a psychologist, Remick discovered Claude Lévi-Strauss, psycholinguistics, and C.S. Peirce—discoveries that changed his life, his writing, and his mind. Remick reads and writes French and Spanish. For a short time, he was the only Spanish speaking social worker in Fresno County. Now that he is older and wiser, he has given up travel in favor of the sedentary life of a writing guru to hordes of writers in Seattle. He enjoys that very much and is very proud of the writers who practice the discipline. Remick taught fiction and screenwriting in University of Washington Certificate programs. He served for several years on the editorial board of Pig Iron magazine as fantasy editor, contributing editor and assistant editor.