At one point in high school, my English teacher made us read A Modest Proposal* by Jonathan Swift; that was the moment I fell in love with satire. Satire is a genre that I think is really hard to do well – but when you nail it, you’ve got something really special on your hands.
Some of the older nuggets on this page are from back when my friend Mark was running DMfiat.com – I actually got paid to write what I loved for the first time in my life. So not only are these stories in the wheelhouse of my favorite genre of writing, there’s that extra twinge of nostalgia which makes them that much more meaningful to me.
Enjoy!
*For those of you who haven’t read the essay I just linked (and who are maybe to lazy or pressed for time to correct that mistake): A Modest Proposal was an essay written by Jonathan Swift in the early 1700’s which suggested that Ireland fix its overpopulation, poverty, and food shortage problems by selling babies to the English nobility and bourgeois for consumption. People took him seriously for some reason, and they were not happy about his suggestion. But his essay did a great job shining a very critical light on socioeconomic problems in Irish and British society at the time. And that’s what I love about satire – it doesn’t just entertain you, but it makes you think.