Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
I have a writer friend, Wendy, who has been suffering from the worst kind of writerly affliction: the dreaded writer’s block. She tells me she’s stuck in the quagmire, sinking slowly, grasping at air. Writer’s block is a daunting creative challenge. You can’t find an idea anywhere. You can’t make any progress on your work-in-progress. You have a physical aversion to sitting down at your...
I was late to Succession, the wildly successful HBO Max series that ran for four seasons. I knew eventually I’d get to it after my sister told me, “I couldn’t stop watching, and I hated every minute of it.” After working my way through the 40-episode series, I can see why she said that. Every episode was compulsively watchable, while often leaving me uncomfortable. I consider that a testament to...
Where I live, for multiple days in the past month the air has been hazy and scented with smoke and the sky cast in a menacing sepia tone. It was like something straight out of a dystopian novel. Huge storms have battered many parts of the world. July was the hottest month ever recorded. The world is on fire. For decades, scientists have warned us about the dangers of a warming planet and climate...
Seventy-eight years ago today, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A second bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9. Between the two attacks, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, leading to a quick Japanese surrender in World War II, and forever changing the course of history. Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” is...
This one is for my writing students. But aren’t we all students of writing? Don’t we all want to write well so that we can communicate clearly and be understood—whether we’re dashing off a text, composing an important email, or pouring our hearts out in a love letter? Writers often do a lot of research to help inform their work, but you can’t just dump a bunch of expository material into your...
You might have heard that the social networking platform formerly known as Twitter is now called X. Owner Elon Musk executed the name change along with a new logo is less than forty-eight hours. No bothering with months of brand research and focus groups for this guy! Not being a Twitter (X) user, my interest is from a branding standpoint. Is this a good business move? The Twitter brand is...
It’s early morning and I’m walking along the Lake Erie shoreline in an area of private beach-front homes. These are big windowed structures built on high slopes and protected by rock walls from the destructive force of Great Lakes storms. I sense I’m being watched and I look up and see someone on a screened porch. Maybe it’s someone who sits every morning with their coffee enjoying their view of...
Many companies invest time, energy, and resources into defining their core values. They look deep inside their own teams, they talk to customers, they evaluate their business goals. From this research, thinking, and collective brainstorming emerge a defined set of values. Maybe there are three of them. Maybe five. Hopefully not more than that because who could live up to so many values? Once...
A couple of years ago, a writer friend told me that soon artificial intelligence will be writing better fiction than we can. I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I didn’t forget his words. On the bright side, it prompted me to write two new novels: The Culling and In Flight. Perhaps I was trying to get something accomplished before I became obsolete. That day might be approaching. Generative AI...
There’s nothing special or particularly inventive about starting with the ending when telling a story. We do it ourselves in the real world all the time. Who among us hasn’t started a story: “Mom, Dad, I’m calling from the police station.” “Okay, son, you better tell us what happened.” And the details leading up to that moment unfold. In the storytelling arts, beginning with the end is an...
Sharks bit three people last week off the beaches of Long Island. The Robert Moses State Park Field Beach was briefly closed on July 4 following a shark sighting. Swimming was banned at several Nantucket beaches earlier this week after great white sharks were spotted in the area. It’s Jaws all over again! Which is why H & I joined a friend to see the original movie when it was playing on the...
The world is on fire, smoke stifles the air, thunderstorms knock out power, the humidity feels like slime–and the garden is happy.
Almost 60 million adults in the U.S. are living in multigenerational family households, according to data from The Pew Research Center. It’s four times the number that did so in 1971. The percentage share also more than doubled, to 18% of the U.S. population. Disclosure: I live in one of these multigenerational family households. Both of our young adult, employed college graduates are...
I’m not usually one for patting myself on the back, but I know I did one thing right as a parent: fostered a love of reading in both of our kids. It began with countless hours of Harriet and I reading to the kids when they were young, then came the phase of pressing upon them to read this or that book I thought they’d appreciate, and now we’re in what I call the era of reciprocity: now they’re...
My siblings and I jointly own a summer cottage in Canada that my father left to us in his will. Growing up in Buffalo, we spent our summers in Canada, in our early years at a place we called Three Acres upon which my father and his buddies hand-built six very rustic cottages in the 1950s. Our current cottage Old cottage Almost fifty years later my dad upgraded to a new place—bigger, with reliable...
It has to be a coincidence. Randomness on display. One world is fiction and the other is real. But something just happened to me that is eerily reminiscent of what happened to the character Robert Besch in my novel In Flight. In the book, after the news spreads that the Plane-Crash Hero had suffered from a dissociative fugue, all kinds of strangers begin contacting Robert. From the novel: There...
1. I’m on my bike riding through a residential neighborhood, zipping down one of the only hills in Bethlehem to gain enough speed to climb up the other side. Ahead of me, I spot two other riders, a man and a woman heading in my direction. They’re on my side of the road. Someone has to move to the other side, and it should be them. They just keep on coming in my direct path. I take a quick look...
I visited with a book group that read In Flight. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with a book group and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the experience (hey, readers talking about my novels—what’s not to enjoy). But I’d forgotten about the first question many readers ask: “How did you get the idea?” No matter how many times I’m asked that question, and no matter which of my novels is being...
The family is together. We’re heading to a birthday party on Long Island. I’m driving seventy-five miles an hour southbound on the New York State Thruway and the hybrid warning light comes on the dashboard with the command to TURN OFF ENGINE. The car immediately loses power. This happens right where Route 17 South merges with the Thruway, five lanes of traffic coming together and we’re in the...
I’m mesmerized by kinetic art—the sculpture that spins, the mobile that sways—and because of that I’m compelled to hang windows in our yard. Every window is a world, and when a window is suspended, when a window floats or sways in the breeze, another facet of that world is yours to behold. My first kinetic window I sourced from the double-hung I saved from our bathroom remodel. It had the old...
