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Patrick Keppel

Time does not heal all wounds. For one thing it often causes them, and then afterwards just widens the gash until like Job the afflicted individual is simply all wound. Nonetheless, sudden breakdowns are useful, if only because for better or worse you always emerge as someone else entirely.


Patrick Keppel grew up in Kansas City, MO., before working his way east till he hit water. Currently he lives in Boston and teaches at Boston University, Simmons College, and at the Walpole correctional facilities.

His works have been published in The Literary Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and Tamaqua. The stories included here are from a collection entitled, The Monologist. He is currently writing plays, including A Word Upon Waking, which was produced at the PlayGround, BU's festival of new plays, and an adaptation of A Knock at Midnight. He has also just completed a novel entitled, Chrysalis Street.

At this point Patrick is investing in cyclone fencing in preparation for an imminent groupie onslaught.


Patrick Keppel, from A Knock at Midnight
Every weekend, often against the wishes of the Mauers, she visited him in his tiny apartment which he vehemently insisted he was too sick ever to leave, and which, out of superstition or else perversity, he always kept absurdly hot, dim, and bare. For nearly ten years she washed and combed and diapered him like her fifth child, even made a few dutiful attempts at saving his immortal soul from the fires of hell that were licking eagerly at his bed sores, only to be rewarded with ever intensifying curses and, at last, dying words which Stefan always quoted to his theatre class whenever they were discussing one of Strindberg's dark dramas: "Rivers,you blind idiot! The lightswitch is right by the door!"


Selections from Patrick Keppel's work:

Tulunasia Park
A Knock at Midnight
In the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum



Also Available Now:

"The Clockwinder of Glanz"

And for more work by Patrick Keppel, see The Secret in the first Web issue of
The Literary Review




Email Patrick Keppel