Mark Trainer

The pages on this site bring together examples of the two kinds of writing I've been doing over the last couple of years.  On the one hand, there are the stories.  I've been writing fiction for a long time, but the idea for this collection came from the what seemed to me a dearth of stories about fathers in the here and now, modern fathers warts and all.

On the other hand, thanks to a friendly editor at The Washington Post, I've become sort of a go-to guy for modern-dad essays (see the nonfiction page).

In one way, this seems like a logical combination.  But part of me worries that if the Post folks read these stories they'll wish they'd never asked me to write in a semi-authoratative voice about parenting. 

Encapsulations of a few Bad Daddies stories:

• The college-age son of an arrogant blowhard catches him at his secret cross-dressing habit.
• Fathers at a children's birthday party try to outdo each other in tearing down each others' wives and children.
• A man feeling pressure to start a family finds the father of three who lives down the block masturbating in his garage.

Not exactly Family Circle material.  And in spite of the collection's name, I don't consider most of these guys to be bad people--bad fathers, maybe. (I'm reminded of the wizard saying to Dorothy and her friends, "I'm not a bad man, just a bad wizard.")  The idea was to find outward--and yeah, maybe extreme--manifestations of conflicts that are hiding in ordinary parent/child relationships.

So expect to see posts here on both the real-world parents of nonfiction and the maybe-even-more-real parents of fiction.