Phil Slattery Author & Publisher of The Chamber

[The following is a comment I made today to a post on Catcher in the Rye made by Colorless Wonderland published four years ago.] Excellent presentation and discussion! I am going to play the age card here and say that I recently turned 68 (born in 1957, 6 years after Catcher in the Rye was first published). The culture I grew up in was only a few years after the culture shown in Catcher, ergo,…

I have been feeling the need to resurrect Rural Fiction Magazine. I have been thinking about this a lot and there is something I love about publishing, particularly publishing something that is intended to help people, and RFM is intended to help people relax and avoid stress during these trying times for not only the US but also for nations around the globe. Publishing RFM is something I really…

"Come with me, my love" -- Blues for an Empty Life

Looking over my website tonight, I realized that although I mention on my Published Works page where to find the few small books I have self-published so far, other than the non-fiction articles I write for this website, there are no samples of my fiction on this site. Instead, I recommend on my Published Works page that you can easily find them by Googling my name and “fiction”. Making you go…

It has been a long time since I last published anything and I miss publishing dearly. I enjoy it immensely and no small part of that enjoyment is working with all the hardworking contributors to both The Chamber and Rural Fiction Magazine. While The Chamber will not be returning in the foreseeable future, RFM may reappear in the near future. It is quite a time commitment, and I have to find a way…

As some of my works have Christianity or at least some type of vague spirituality or metaphysics lurking in the backstory or surfacing here or there in a plot or in a character, I thought it would be a good idea to clarify just what my religious vs. spiritual beliefs are. Let me summarize my beliefs (yes, this is a summary; my beliefs are somewhat intricate), however haphazardly organized they…

If you have been reading my blog regularly, you know that I believe that a work should be as short as possible, because, like a bullet, the smaller it is, the more powerful it is.  I try not to have a preconceived notion of how long a story should be.  I try to just write the story, keeping it as short as possible, and let the story decide its own length. To market my works I use duotrope.com,…

From 1989 to 1991 I worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington, DC. Part of my duties included writing short briefing papers for high-level Pentagon and State Department officials. As part of my training, I took a DIA course called Writing for Decisionmakers. Its aim was to teach analysts to write short briefing papers for users who would be under daunting workloads and…

These photos were taken by Phil Slattery at Rohwer on July 5, 2020. These are not full resolution. The full resolution photos are downloadable from Wikimedia Commons. For several months, a lot of people were visiting my article on returning to Rohwer War Relocation Camp. I am not complaining. I am simply mystified that there is so much interest in it, much more than my other articles. I do not…