Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
You say you have the February blues, induced by the winter browns and grays and whites, the flat palette and the breath-stealing cold and the stinging, relentless wind, and for a while you can sit by the fire and read a good book and work on your puzzles and cook comforting food, but you begin to stir and can’t simply run the clock until spring, you have to stare down the season, but you don’t...
The gallery and arts center MASS MoCA occupies the space of a nineteenth-century textile mill in North Adams, Massachusetts. This week we spent a brutally cold winter day roaming its galleries. Two exhibits stood out to me. Vincent Valdez’s work focuses on identity, social justice, and American History. A number of his oil paintings are done in grayscale, which I’ve not seen often. This one of...
I heard from a reader who got started on STILL LIFE and said that this sentence, which appears on only the second page of the novel, struck him as a perfect sentence: “I imagine the lake, too, through the leafless gap in the trees that winter opened like a cathedral door.” I don’t share this to brag or blow my own horn. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do much of that. If anything, I’m more...
The day you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: the publication of my sixth novel, STILL LIFE, about a young artist whose creative energy and love life go sideways when his estranged father tracks him down. The best way to get your hands on this book (and extra copies for your friends and family) is to order STILL LIFE right here. I hope you like STILL LIFE, will write a review on Amazon...
I dreamt about S. for the third night in a row. I have no idea why. I won’t tell you the details because the dream events are chaotic, surreal in nature, with many jump-cuts and a complete lack of narrative continuity. The way most dreams are. I could never shape the retelling in a way that would make sense or be interesting to you. Plus, other people’s dreams are boring. For the same reasons I...
Another set of lyrics that need to be set to music. I’m playing with the AAA-BBB-CCC-etc. rhyming pattern and trying to disguise a theme. You’re lovely tonight in my favorite blueAnd then you do the thing that you doBreak my heart I’ll always be true Oh special one, my endless devotionLost like a boat adrift on the oceanDeep in the haze of your magic potion Not made for each other but...
Not only did my beloved Buffalo Bills suffer yet another brutal and heartbreaking playoff loss, but they followed it with what I believe is a major organizational blunder. Fans of the team saw how controversial officiating calls led directly to this gritty team losing to the Denver Broncos in the divisional round of the playoffs. Sure, the team made many mistakes of their own, turning the ball...
You know when friends send you links and say you have to read this or watch that, and maybe sometimes you do? Well, a writer friend sent me a link to British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I wasted no time watching it from beginning to end, forty-nine minutes. Ishiguro is one of my favorite writers. I’ve read all eight of his novels and his one...
The dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1949. It was assigned as part of the English curriculum in my high school. I still have a copy of the novel on my bookshelf, and I reread it a few years ago. The totalitarian society depicted is led by the dictator Big Brother and supported by mass surveillance and the Thought Police, which publishes a steady stream of propaganda and...
My upcoming novel, Still Life, took 33 years to write. That’s not a typo. With half a dozen published novels already behind me, my average time from concept to conclusion was about two years—one year for a first draft, another year for a bunch more drafts. So what the hell happened this time? In a previous century, in the year 1992, I wrote a short story titled “The Painter’s Son,” in which an...
The hottest actor these days seems to be Timothee Chalamet, and his latest film is the frenetic Marty Supreme. The film follows swaggering, twenty-something, table-tennis hustler Marty Mauser, a prodigy from New York’s streets who is attempting to raise enough money to travel to Japan to compete in a world championship tournament. Chalamet is at his best in a role that showcases his talent and...
Like all types of sonnets, a Petrarchan sonnet is fourteen lines. It is sometimes called an Italian sonnet, and it has a specific rhyming pattern and two distinct halves. The first half is an octet (eight lines); the second half is a sestet (six lines). The octet establishes an initial idea, problem, or emotional state, and the sestet responds to it. The liminal space between the first and second...
That Spotify Wrapped is a real eye-opener. I found out my listening age is 73! Spotify called me an old soul, although I’ve probably been one since I was born. So I happen to like Gimme Shelter, I like Lay Lady Lay, and Blind Faith and Neil Young. I like the soul songs of Dione Warwick and Gladys Knight. But I also listen to a fair amount of alt-country and hip-hop. So says Spotify Wrapped...
Dots have always fascinated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who continues to create art at the age of ninety-six. As a child, she experienced hallucinations where dots often appeared, and soon she began making art with polka dots. She said the use of dots was a way to confront and gain control over the terrifying hallucinations. What better way to deal with trauma than through art? Kusama also sees...
Julia Klein is a Registered Dietitian and Nutritionist (RDN). She has written previous guest posts for this blog. This one is an update to a perennial favorite that can help you navigate the stress associated with food and the holidays. The holidays are often described as joyful and abundant, yet for many people, they also bring increased anxiety around food, comments about dieting, and pressure...
I’ve been shoveling snow every winter since I can remember, except for the years I lived in California. In seventh and eighth grades, in my snowy hometown of Buffalo, I shoveled our narrow driveway and front walk, and then I shoveled the driveway for my elderly next-door neighbors, at fifty cents a pop. During Buffalo’s snowy winters, that kind of income added up. When my family moved to a bigger...
Jane is an emergency room physician. She helps deliver a preterm infant whose addicted mother comes into the hospital totally high, in severe pain, and unaware she’s in labor. Even though Jane acts heroically to save the lives of mother and baby, the situation weighs on her. She’s overworked, just over thirty years old, in an uncertain relationship with Vincent, and hopes to have a baby of her...
I didn’t play “Cowboys and Indians” as a kid. I never had a cowboy hat or cowboy boots. I grew up in a city, not the countryside. Other than a few Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns—“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “High Plains Drifter”—I paid little attention to the genre. So when Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his epic western novel “Lonesome Dove,” I barely noticed. At the...
My regular doc I see annually is old school and old country. Until a few years ago, he operated a solo private practice as an internist, although to survive in the U.S. healthcare dystopia, he’s now been swallowed up by a larger health network, as has almost every other physician and medical practice. But he still manages to run his practice as if he’s from another era. When I was first...
I’m packing my toiletry bag for the weekend visit with my parents when I realize my pills are gone. How could I have run out and not noticed? When was the last time I took one? Weeks ago. I haven’t needed them, not since returning from our vacation. But now I miss them, not because I’m craving but because I want to be prepared. I want my line of defense, just in case. I hold the plastic bottle...
