Dennis Palumbo

As some of you may know, I'm a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues. But I also write mystery fiction, both short stories and novels. Which means I also read a lot of mystery fiction, and have for many, many years.

And since I believe good...

In Fever Dream (Poisoned Pen Press) the second in my series of crime thrillers featuring psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, my hero makes use of psychiatric diagnoses when dealing with patients. Yet he also expresses misgivings, as he did in the first novel, about the legitimacy of these clinical...

I must admit, I've had an interesting career journey. For many years I was a Hollywood screenwriter, after which I became a licensed psychotherapist specializing in treating creative types in the entertainment community. Now, 24 years into a deeply fulfilling private practice, I've added a new item to my resume:...

In the recent film The Company Men, long-time corporate employees (played by Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper) are down-sized out of their jobs. After months of self-recrimination and futile attempts at re-training, Affleck's character finally works through his feelings of worthlessness and figures out how to start a new career,...

"Interpretation does not stand apart from the emotional relationship between patient and analyst; it is an inseparable and, to my mind, crucial dimension of that relationship."
-- Robert Stolorow, Ph.D

For almost five years, I was a member of Dr. Robert Stolorow's weekly supervision group for psychotherapists, psychologists, and...

In the early 60's, there was a hot art-house movie called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I think of this film sometimes when trying to help my writer patients working on long-form projects---novels, plays, screenplays, etc. The running analogy is a good one, because
long-form writing...

With the publication of my new novel, Mirror Image, a lot of people have asked why I set the mystery thriller in Pittsburgh. My usual, somewhat facetious answer is that New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami were all taken.

The real answer, apart from the fact that I...

"The problem with the world," according to philosopher Bertran Russell, "is that the stupid are cock-sure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

I thought of his comment this past week, in the wake of the depressing number of Tea Party candidates who won the GOP nominations for elective office...

Okay, here's the good news, at least from my perspective: my first crime novel, Mirror Image, has just been published by Poisoned Pen Press. It has fine reviews, a promising start on sales, and -- thanks to the publisher's art department -- an extremely cool cover.

Ray Bradbury once said, "There is only one type of story in the world--your story."

In other words, all writing is autobiographical. No matter how seemingly removed in time and space from the reality of your own life, you're writing about yourself. Even your impulse to...

If you're a writer---whether of novels or short stories, articles or essays, TV scripts or screenplays---you definitely have them, and keep them close to your heart.

What am I talking about? Those great lines of dialogue, that particularly vivid descriptive passage, the one stubbornly insistent joke that...

It's a growth industry--the hundreds of books, tapes and videos available on the craft of writing; the multitudes of conferences, seminars and workshops (some of which I've taught myself over the years); the teachers and coaches and gurus promising to reveal the secrets of the "can't-miss" premise, the "never-fails" plot...

Outrage!!

There's no other word to describe my reaction to the news today of the behavior of Tea Party protesters as the historic health care reform bill is being voted on in the Capitol. Hurling racist epithets at a veteran black Congressmen like John Lewis, making disparaging comments to openly...

The author Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) once said that the purpose of fiction was, among other things, to chronicle a society's "status details." In other words, to give the reader a felt sense of the social, cultural and political realities of the world the novel portrays.

Usually,...

I remember, as a kid, an embroidered sampler my aunt had on her living room wall. It read, "Lord, grant me patience---but hurry!"

I think of this saying often, especially when working in therapy with my writer patients. Not surprising. After all, commercial writing---books, magazines, TV and film---is a present-tense...

With the success of the new film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, I'm reminded of the following pithy little fable. (But I'll be damned if I can remember where I first heard it.)

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went for an...

Last week, my wife and I finally got around to seeing the film Doubt, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley. Based on his own play, it concerns the head of a Catholic school, a veteran nun played by Meryl Streep, who becomes convinced that the new priest (Phillip Seymour...

As a former Hollywood screenwriter, now a therapist who treats creative people, I hear jaw-dropping stories about the state of the entertainment industry every day in my practice. But I have to admit, this new anecdote gives me pause.

A patient of mine told me last week about a friend...

Reading Frank Rich's recent, gripping essay in The New York Times on the growing frenzy of hate-speech aimed at President Obama, I was struck by one paragraph in particular.

Following Obama's recent address in Cairo, Rich writes, "It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe...

There's an old joke about the relationship between writers and agents: a writer comes home to find police and fire trucks crowding the street. As he scrambles out of his car, he sees that there's nothing left of his house but a pile of black dust and smoking embers.