Iain S. Baird
IAIN S.
BAIRD is an award-winning writer published in numerous literary magazines in the United
States and abroad, including: The Delmarva Review, Seven Hills Review, CHA:
An Asian Literary Journal, The Survivors Review, The Timber Creek Review, Oracle, The
Berkshire Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Louisiana: In Words, and others. TWO STORMS is his
first memoir.
He is the recipient of several prizes for short stories and creative nonfiction from the Maryland Writers’ Association and the Tallahassee Writers’ Association. He won the William March Award for Best Short Story and the Eugene Walter Award for Best Novel. He was a Finalist for the William Wisdom Award from the William Faulkner Festival and won the First Place Award in the Delmarva Review’s 2012 Short fiction Contest. He was nominated for a Pushcart Award in 2007 and again in 2012 (twice.). He is listed in the Writers’ Directory of Poets and Writers.
His photography has been displayed in the New Orleans Museum of Art (Katrina Exposed Exhibition) and by the Digital Photography Club of Annapolis, Maryland.
He is a member of the Maryland Writers Association and the Tallahassee Writers Association.
He splits his time among New Orleans, Annapolis, and the Panhandle of Florida.
He is the recipient of several prizes for short stories and creative nonfiction from the Maryland Writers’ Association and the Tallahassee Writers’ Association. He won the William March Award for Best Short Story and the Eugene Walter Award for Best Novel. He was a Finalist for the William Wisdom Award from the William Faulkner Festival and won the First Place Award in the Delmarva Review’s 2012 Short fiction Contest. He was nominated for a Pushcart Award in 2007 and again in 2012 (twice.). He is listed in the Writers’ Directory of Poets and Writers.
His photography has been displayed in the New Orleans Museum of Art (Katrina Exposed Exhibition) and by the Digital Photography Club of Annapolis, Maryland.
He is a member of the Maryland Writers Association and the Tallahassee Writers Association.
He splits his time among New Orleans, Annapolis, and the Panhandle of Florida.
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The Lakeview Motel When I returned to the brick rambler on Decatur Street, I expected old memories to greet me, but not the past I found. After my father’s death, Mom called my older sister and me home to triage the contents of the house: stuff to the dump, goods to donate, and a final, much smaller pile to sell on E-Bay. The rest Mom would take to Clayton, seven miles away, where she would go to live with her brother...read more... |
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The One
Upper
Dog soup usually does it. But if it doesn’t, I have one more culinary oddity in my historical pantry that I can place on the table. We’re dining with Trish and Robert (never Bob) in their newly renovated double shotgun house in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. Trish is an old college friend of my wife’s from Massachusetts. Robert is Trish’s new husband, whom we’ve only met a couple of times. He’s amiable enough, with a big laugh and a belly to match, though he has one annoying trait. He’s a One-Upper...read more... |
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The
Guildemeister
Ronny Jefferson’s most prized possession is the carved walnut walking stick with the solid gold handle the shape and size of a cue ball. Well, maybe his second most valuable possession, if you consider the matching set of artificial legs given to him by the V.A. after his discharge from the Army in '73. But neither the legs nor the cane is with him now in Washington, D.C. They wait for him in a closet in the rear of a one-bedroom apartment off a vine-covered courtyard on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter. It’ll be two more weeks until Ronny finds himself back in New Orleans....read more... |
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TWO
STORMS (Excerpt)
I blame myself for Katrina. Both my children wanted outdoor weddings, and I made a bargain with the Weather Gods. "Give us a beautiful day, and we'll never complain about the weather again." The Gods listened...read more... Click here to purchase TWO STORMS. |
A Night at the Taj
The sun has yet to rise as we walk through the ancient arched stone gateway and into the shadowy garden. There, ahead in the soft, pink glow of this pre-dawn October morning looms the Taj Mahal, still shrouded in the retreating night's mist. My wife Ann and I are touring India with our friends, Maralyn and Bob. We've traveled more than eight thousand miles from our home in New Orleans and across ten and a half time zones. But for me, the journey is even longer. I've traveled through time; it's been half a century since I last stood on this ground...read more...
A New York Moment
As we step from the East Village’s Punjabi Restaurant, the scent of cumin, cardamom, and coriander follow us in to the damp city evening. The late spring shower has washed the street clean, and the red, green, and yellow reflections from the traffic lights and neon signs bounce off the glistening black pavement. A yellow cab pulls up to the curb in front of the restaurant, dislodging a young couple...read more...
The Guy in the Box
I wanted to scream. They were all in denial: my wife, Kathy, her mother — we called her Mother Rita — and her father, Louie. I drove through the snowy night, gripping the steering wheel tighter trying to keep the car steady on the slippery Rhode Island highway. At the same time, I struggled to keep my impatience in check as the rest of the family chatted away amiably as if nothing was off center. Laughing and jabbering, all in denial. Well, maybe not Louie with his hold on reality slipping away so rapidly. Denial may have been beyond his capabilities. I felt like the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind, trying, as I had been for months, to lead the family to accept Louie’s dementia. But no one was seeing it my way...read more...
The Story Teller
When I was eight years old, I believed that color had not come into the world until World War II. Before then, my father told me the world was black and white and various tints of gray. Supposedly, color was an invention of the Nazis that had been brought to the United States when all those Jewish scientists like Einstein fled from the Third Reich. That explained why all the photographs before then were in black and white. They were just capturing the world the way it looked in those days. When I asked my father about old paintings that were in color, he explained to me that they had been sprayed with color later after it had been invented. Before then they’d been black and white, too...read more...