My Writing

I’ve always been hooked on writing fiction. I love to create characters and watch how they deal with certain trying situations. As a grad student at Columbia, I also started writing poetry. My teacher there, the internationally-known Georgia Heard, taught me so much about getting in touch with my feelings and putting them down in writing. After I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2012, I started a blog, www.parkingsuns.com, and branched out to writing sonnets (and once wrote over 100 haiku about Parkinson’s).

Book

Invitations

Welcome to Invitations: Fiction and Poetry from a Life of Writing, a collection of poems and short stories that I wrote or completed over the past dozen years, ever since I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

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Reviews on Amazon

Excellent Book! – courageous and compassionate

Cynthia D - Amazon.com

Beautifully written, passionate account of confronting life’s odds.

HBD - Amazon.com

This unique book should not be missed.

Ellen Graham - Amazon.com

Poignant and Inspiring.

Literary Redhead - Amazon.com

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Watch Bruce and friends read and discuss his book at the Hudson Valley Books for Humanity.

Watch Bruce read two poems and the opening paragraphs from one story in the book.

Reviews

A captivating collection, full of charged atmospherics, lyrical emotions, and searing imagery.

Living with Parkinson’s Disease, the nuances of urban gay life, and a bloody uprising of livestock against their human oppressors are among the subjects of these beguiling poems and stories.

Ballard, who blogs about his own Parkinson’s experiences, pens many sonnets and haiku about living with the ailment, offering a plangent but good-humored take on motion disorders (“A poppy’s petals / Gently fall to the soft earth. / Not me—I crash land”) and the limitations of the condition. Several short stories explore gay life in Manhattan. In “Invitations,” a narrator riding the subway is fondled—to his delight—by a younger man who then gives him an invitation to a sex club where he enjoys raunchy encounters but contracts a mild STD; months later he runs into the fondler again, who now regrets past excesses. In “Rufino,” a narrator falls in love with the title character, a Mexican American of Mayan ancestry, and wrestles with the conflicted legacy of Rufino’s Catholicism—both its homophobia and its tradition of caring for the persecuted. Ballard rounds out the collection with intriguing genre pieces. In the eerie “Weathered,” an American teacher in Asia notices an occult pattern playing out in a repeated, seemingly random confluence of bowls, swirling fluids, tunnels, and people shouting at him—which are always followed by devastating tropical storms. And in “The Turkey,” a serio-comic mashup of “The Raven” and Animal Farm, a young barnyard turkey learns of the approaching doomsday of Thanksgiving and leads the animals in revolt against Farmer Joe, wreaking havoc on humans and beasts alike and prompting bleak reflections on mortality. Ballard’s writing is infused with subtle, mysterious, open-ended meanings, but it’s always grounded in sharply observed, painfully intense physical specificity. (“I’m scared of choking,” he writes in the poem “Six Years with Parkinson’s Disease: Status Update.” “Every time I pour / A tall, cool glass of water, I’m afraid / The water will explode like a grenade.”) The result is a richly textured take on an illness and on other baffling complexities of life.

A captivating collection, full of charged atmospherics, lyrical emotions, and searing imagery.

Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers’ Favorite

Life never dishes out what we expect. Indeed, life can be brutally unfair. But we’ve been told that we’ll only get what we can handle. Bruce Ballard’s Invitations takes a look at his life as a writer with Parkinson’s disease. He was a young man when he was first diagnosed. Like Michael J. Fox, Bruce rose to the challenge and continued with his writing, managing a blog dedicated to the disease. There is no self-pity in this memoir, just brutal reality. His poems and stories depict a life well lived. A man passionate about travel, he’s visited many countries and written about his experiences. It hasn’t been easy, but, as he writes, “With this incurable disease, I find/ I have the upper hand, and that my mind,/ While losing dopamine, still works fine.”

Bruce Ballard’s book, Invitations: Fiction and Poetry From a Life of Writing, is a passionate look at a writer’s life, one who has the added burden of living with Parkinson’s disease. The collection of poems and stories is sincere and reflective, dwelling on themes of life, love, loss, death, and, of course, Parkinson’s disease. Many of the poems are sonnets, an unusual but very disciplined form of poetry that the author masters succinctly and with ease. There are also some haiku, like this one that challenges his writer’s muse: “Do these haiku slow/ My cognitive impairment?/ Let’s all write some more…” The author’s prowess with narrative is evident in his intense stories which reveal multiple levels of emotions. A poignant and engaging read.

Independent Book Review - A Celebration of Indie Books

A hybrid collection filled with sublime prose about life, pain, and love

Bruce Ballard’s Invitations is a culmination of poetry and short stories, some focused on Parkinson’s while others are a window to a fictional world.

The poetry tends to center around Parkinson’s and brings knowledge of the disease to the foreground. One poem, named “The Guest,” thoroughly examines life with Parkinson’s and the desire to hold onto hope. The short stories have distinct protagonists with a focal point on sexuality and romance.

Invitations is a special kind of reading experience from beginning to end. The mixing of settings, formats, and fictions make for a constantly surprising collection, each with its own flare. While the stories are often fantastical and dramatic, the poetry interrupts with a dose of realism—a wonderful dynamic.

The poetry takes on a variety of forms, including haikus and sonnets. The sonnets are particularly memorable, the rigid style working well with the subject matter of health. The word usage and rhyme are also quite clever, especially when you consider how difficult it has to be to rhyme with Parkinson’s.

One noteworthy poem, “The Turkey,” felt out of place at first. It follows a similar rhythm to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” but “The Turkey” follows a group of farm animals in their uprising against the farmer and his family. They are led by Tom Turkey, who warns them of the farmer’s intention to kill the livestock for Thanksgiving. The poem ends on a more existential note, asking what the meaning of life is amidst all the carnage. This allegory for war ends as my favorite piece of the collection. There’s no logic in creating suffering: a theme that continues to arise in the text.

Invitations has so many intimate, frank, important moments. In a section titled “The Last Call,” the narrator has a conversation with his doctor about potentially contracting an STD. Rather than dulcifying the experience, Ballard shares a forthright dialogue on the topic in a successful, immediate second person. The HIV epidemic of the 1980s is delved into with care, a subject personal and global to the narrator. I really enjoyed the subtle inclusions of religion, too, as Ballard intersects race, religion, gender, and even class in a way that always feels authentic.

Invitations would be a great fit for all source of readers—fiction, memoir, poetry. It platforms crucial issues like Parkinson’s, health, religion, and beyond in thoughtful, insightful ways. Although it can be quite vivid, especially with intimacy, it’s done in a way that is necessary to the conversation. Readers will step away from this collection with gratitude for having discovered it.

Invitations: Fiction and Poetry From A Life of Writing will attract literary audiences interested in collections that reflect on health in general and the experience of living with Parkinson’s in particular. As such, it embraces elements of both memoir and health guide as Bruce Ballard investigates the progression of his condition in a very different way than most medical surveys. Literature readers will find the structure of the book features longer fictional pieces juxtaposed with shorter poems about Parkinsons which take the form of sonnets and haikus. Another surprise is that the collection is more about life than Parkinson’s. Readers who anticipate a survey of all facets of living with the disease will find refreshing Ballard’s focus on all facets of living life in a milieu where Parkinson’s challenges are but one aspect of these experiences. Whether he’s describing the intense experience of a visit to the sex club Elixir or exploring Parkinson’s in a dozen haikus that reflect that milieu, Ballard’s voice is alternately stark, candid, reflective, and immersive. Examples of these hard-hitting poems include: A moth fluttering / Its wings makes more noise than me / When my voice goes soft. And: After two hours at / The gym, I leave, breathe deeply, / And exhale the Moon. It should be cautioned that sometimes the sex scenes are steamy. This only lends to the attraction of a collection that explores the disparate themes of love, sex, life, and death in a manner that pulls no punches and delivers no disappointment. Libraries and readers looking for literature that operates on the thin line of memoir, philosophical reflection, life experience, and health challenges will welcome Invitations: Fiction and Poetry From A Life of Writing for both its literary backbone and its ability to serve as a thought-provoking read for individuals and book clubs alike.

D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Other Writing

Books

Writing and Pausing at the Computer: A Case Study of an Experienced Writer (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College, 1994)