Didona

Joseph Emil Blum has published numerous poems, plays, essays and columns. He was born in Ohio and raised in New York. His first paid job was removing ice from a Cadillac at the age of seven. Abandoning that promising career he then went on to the care of exotic animals, life-guarding, home insulating, construction, carpentry, fisheries biology, teacher of the living and the dying, and lavender farming. At the age of nineteen he moved to the Pacific Northwest and now lives in rural Oregon with his wife Nancy and daughter Ruby. He spends winters alternately tormented and pleased by the thundering sounds of amorous chorus frogs, and summers alternately tormented and pleased by slowly pitched softballs. He is very proud to have juggled fish in the Bering Sea while working aboard the world’s largest fishing vessel, the Sulak: an act he believes may have facilitated the end of the Cold War, and is equally proud to have sung in a Soviet fisherman’s dance band aboard the same vessel: an act that, no doubt, prolonged it. Bedtime Stories is his first novel.