A Thematic Journaling Workshop for Gay Men 60+

Here’s something people don’t often mention about getting older: the more life we’ve lived, the more interesting we become.

The places we’ve lived, the people we’ve loved, the versions of yourselves we’ve tried on and kept or discarded. It’s all there in the tapestry of our lives.

This journaling workshop is a place for rediscovery through journaling. No experience required, no literary ambitions necessary. Just a willingness to follow some simple good prompt, and see what comes out when we explore ourselves.

We’ll write together, share if we feel like it, and leave with more pages than we arrived with.

What to expect: A warm, low-pressure Zoom session with short writing exercises, optional sharing, and a take-home prompt to keep the momentum going.

Who it’s for: Gay men 60 and older — whether you’ve never kept a journal or you used to and stopped.

Led by Mark McNease, certified Guided Autobiography Instructor and author of fifteen novels, who believes everyone in the room has a story worth writing.

Today in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we’re offering another short story from Mark McNease’s collection, ‘Five of a Kind.’

Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part.

We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and the slow, steady retreat of everyone he ever loved — until only his books, his silence, and finally his paintings remained.

A haunting, deeply human story about disfigurement, isolation, and the particular cruelty of surviving intact on the inside while the world refuses to see past the outside. Jawbone begins where a young man’s life as he knew it ends.

Welcome to The Twist, episode 327. Mark and Rick take on the news from a crazy week, finger wag the Supreme Court, dish on the Met Gala, and reveal some unknown facts about Tennessee Williams.

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The first farmers/outdoor market of the season
Putting the heavy coats and clothes away till next time
That one perfect spring morning when everything smells like possibility
Seeing everyone outside again after a long winter
Name your own in the comments

Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.

Today we conclude our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written, with chapters 14 through 29. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction’s most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, the remaining chapters of Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room.’

Marshall James: Chapters Twenty-Five Through Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Five finds Marshall waking up in Leland’s apartment the morning after a drug-fueled night he remembers all too clearly. Filled with regret, he dresses, slips out, and returns to Trent Stoffer’s Upper East Side apartment — where he finds the place ransacked and Trent dead, bound and tortured in his bedroom. Knowing the police will eventually trace him to the scene, Marshall grabs a hidden computer disk from his suitcase and disappears into the New York morning — just as Carlton the doorman picks up the phone.

Chapter Twenty-Six steps out of the thriller’s timeline for a quieter moment, as Marshall and Boo walk the streets of Lambertville, taking in Bridge Street, the Brightside Diner, and the unhurried pace of small-town life. For the first time in a long time, Marshall feels something loosen. He begins to think Lambertville might be exactly the change he needs.

Chapter Twenty-Seven brings us back to the immediate crisis. With nowhere to go and the clock ticking, Marshall makes his way to the Big Cup coffee shop in Chelsea, where he encounters Colin — a young, sharp-eyed escort with a gift for reading people. Out of options and running on fumes, Marshall accepts Colin’s offer of a couch and a few hours of sleep, knowing he’s going to have to tell someone the truth very soon.