After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.” I...
A Day of Protest
Despite feeling lethargic and unmotivated at the tail end of having Covid (again!), I made my way to downtown Albany because today was 50501—50 protests at 50 state capitals all on 1 day. Living right near a state capital, I felt compelled to show up. It’s been a difficult few months since the election, and an even tougher couple of weeks since the inauguration. Our country has been divided into...
What Fascinates the Artist
It’s a thrill to discover an artist, writer, or musician for the first time. Yayoi Kusama is a 95-year-old Japanese artist whose installations I experienced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Throughout a career lasting decades, she has harbored a fascination with polka dots and pumpkins. I can see why those shapes inspire a visual artist. This mirror room with polka dots creates...
Invisible Chauffeur
One of the most iconic car chase scenes in movie history takes place in the 1968 film Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen as Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt. McQueen drives a Mustang GT pursued by a Dodge Charger during a riveting car chase through the hilly, treacherous streets of San Francisco. The streets are so steep that the cars whizzing downhill launch into the air and...
The Legend of Lumpy
I have this pillow, it has a name: Lumpy, a name Owen came up with some years ago when he used Lumpy as his bed pillow. Folklore has it that Lumpy was my pillow from childhood, and I think I remember this—tucking into bed at night with a heavy pillow that was in parts too crammed with feathers and in other parts lacking, so that my head rested on uneven, contoured terrain, in places soft, in...
Memories of an Old Friend
It’s May, I’m in sixth grade, I’m on the sidewalk in front of my house on Amherst Street back when we still lived on the busy street. The bridal veil bushes are covered in clusters of white blooms and my parents are sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee in the evening after dinner. I’m throwing a tennis ball against the wooden porch stairs and it bounces back to me. I catch the grounder in...
Fascination with Vampires
The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
The Rainmaker Will Douse the Fires

It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the hot, urgent Santa Ana foehn winds fueled devastating fires in the Los Angeles area. But this most recent episode might be the most horrific of all, arriving on the tail of an extremely dry season and following the hottest year ever on record. This isn’t a forest fire burning acres of trees in a remote area; this one is burning houses...
Song for the Next Unknown
A while ago I wrote lyrics for a friend of mine who’s a singer-songwriter and I’m back at it. The timing is right because I’ve become interested in the most rudimentary element of poetry and lyrics: rhyming schemes. I’ve been spending way too much time playing with language and experimenting with rhyming patterns and how they shape–and are shaped by–theme and...
Dear Mary:

Dear Mary: I’ve decided to finally respond to your emails not because I remember you, but because I don’t. When you first contacted me after my name and face appeared in the media following the plane crash, I had no recall of you. After you sent a second email with your photo attached posing in front of Agora in Grant Park—a photo you claimed I took—I still had no recollection of you. I assumed...
Portnoy Would Like to File a Complaint
I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form of book censorship. But that’s just my...
Resolutions are Out–Intentions are In!
We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more mindful and grateful, helping others, spending more time with family, etc. A few of us wanted...
2024 Wrap

We all read listicles—”The Top Ten This” and “The Eight Ways to Do That.” It’s a popular format in this era of short attention spans. But I have a tip for readers to make listicles even faster and easier to read: skip all the introductory text (such as this paragraph) and go right to the list. There’s rarely any useful information in the introduction. Or you...
Villanelle #1: Don’t You Ever Get The Blues
I’ve recently paid attention to the sonnet form of poetry, and even wrote a modest entry of my own. Now I’ve been studying the villanelle. Like a sonnet, a villanelle follows a defined structural form, and therein lies my interest, which is why I’ve been drawn to Pecha Kucha. As a novelist, I have a lot of creative license with form: you can do anything you want, as long as you keep the reader...
Gifts for the Readers on Your List
Wondering what to give to that smart and curious person on your holiday gift list? Try one of these gripping novels: IN FLIGHT A business executive and family man survives a plane crash but suffers a rare dissociative fugue, disappearing for several days until he is found and must put his life back together. Reviewers wrote: “Simply put, this book is excellent. In Flight is a thought...
Crows Hold Grudges — Do You?
Do you hold grudges? Crows do. They have a keen intelligence on the level of chimpanzees and can identify and remember faces—and remember wrongs. I recently read a feature about crows and the people tormented by them (New York Times). The American Crow One of the victims was Gene Carter, from Seattle, who once waved a rake in his backyard at crows encroaching on a robin’s nest. Since then, crows...
Sonnet #1
Although my lifelong writing love is the novel, I’m exploring other forms in my dotage. Like my love for Pecha Kucha, where you write and recite a story that takes exactly 6:40 seconds to tell, using 20 slides that each stay on the screen for 20 seconds. Three times I’ve performed that dog and pony show in front of live audiences, and had fun every time. I’ve also dabbled in shorter fiction, just...
Stairway to Heaven

I had two encounters yesterday—random occurrences but related thematically. In the morning, I pulled into the parking lot at the auto parts store where I’d gone to get a new battery installed in my vehicle. As I approached the entrance, a man came out of the store and approached me. He apologized for bothering me and said he hated to ask, but he was short three dollars for a part he needed and...
Best Movie of the Year?
Paul, Jimmy, and I formed a three-person film club to support our recently re-opened local independent movie theater, The Spectrum. We committed to attending a film together every month. Last night was our first go, and we brought along my niece, Ani, who was visiting. It was Paul’s idea for the club, so he got to choose the first movie: Anora, a genre mashup I’ll call a romdramedy—romance...
“Burn” by Peter Heller
To fill in the time I no longer spend reading disturbing news I’m reading more fiction, which can also be disturbing but at least is made up. I finished Peter Heller’s “Burn” in just a few days. Heller writes literary adventure novels. His first novel, “The Dog Stars,” is about a pilot navigating life in a dystopian America where most people have died in a plague. I thought it was excellent. But...