Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
The first rule of the Dad’s Movie Club is that we have to follow all of the rules. We have many of them. Rule #5: Movie night shall occur on the second Wednesday of every month, unless a special exception is granted in a given month and all three officers unanimously agree to the exception, which has happened only once when movie night fell on my wedding anniversary and we voted to go on Tuesday...
Today I honor the two most influential mothers in my life: my mother, Irene Klein, and my life partner and mother to Julia and Owen, Harriet Jaffe. Irene It’s been more than forty years since I’ve had a mother. I have only the same few memories of my mother; many are foggy. I can form no new ones. And many memories are long forgotten. But I know this: I loved my mom deeply. I felt a strong...
In the 2025 World Happiness Report, the United States dropped to its lowest ranking since that survey began. The U.S. ranked 24th out of 147 countries, a decline from its 15th-place ranking in 2023 and its highest ranking of 11th place in 2012. The low score can be attributed by the unhappiness of people under the age of 30. While the U.S. was 24th overall, for people aged 20-30, we were...
It gives me a boost to know that across the country people were engaged in mass protests today against the Trump authoritarian regime. May 1—known as May Day—is the perfect opportunity to take to the streets. May Day has a long association with pagan and spring festivals in Europe dating back to the Roman Empire, and has become synonymous with the labor movement in the last 150 years. In 1889 an...
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and I’m sure you know a mom who loves to read. What better for a mom than a page-turning family saga? Now through Mother’s Day, my novels In Flight and The Suitor are available on sale for only $12! That’s right, hours of reading pleasure for your favorite mom. Doesn’t she deserve the best? Click on the cover images and order your copies today—you’ll have...
I’m rethinking an adage I’ve often believed in: you are what you do. The novelist Annie Dillard best encapsulated this concept when she wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Dillard reinforces the concept that our lives consist of what we do with our time. The word “do” places the spotlight on...
In my continuing effort to support our only local theater, the Spectrum, that screens independent, classic, and cult-status films along with first-run mainstream movies, we went to see Sinners the other night. What a crazy, highly entertaining fusion of Horror, Western, Musical, Period Piece, Black genre, and Thriller. It sounds like it can’t work. It worked! Ryan Coogler, who directed Black...
It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.” The...
As I wrote in my previous post, Villanelle #1, a villanelle poem adheres to a strict form. It comprises nineteen lines—five tercets of three lines each, and one four-line quatrain at the end. There is a fixed rhyming pattern, and the first and third lines of the opening tercet are called the refrain and are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas. In the final stanza, the...
Winter felt long and imagine my pleasure seeing the first brave flowers of spring, these snowdrops stretching and opening between a crack in the rocks. I was so excited I wrote about it. And then visited another harbinger of spring: rabbits. Those darn bunny rabbits ate my pretty flowers down to the bone. “Curse you, dastardly rabbits!” In an earlier era, we didn’t have a rabbit problem. We had...
Nature handed us cold, wind, and rain the entire time, and yet the turnout for Hands Off at the New York State Capitol looked to be several thousand Americans who are sick and tired of an authoritarian administration run by a cruel, amoral, abusive, lying felon and his billionaire enablers. Despite the weather, the crowd was enthusiastic, the signs plentiful and creative. The faces I saw were...
I savor each season in its turn and yet I wait for the first sign of the next, the emerald tree canopy of summer, the crisp red leaves of autumn, the first snowflakes from the sky, and now, finally—I’ve been looking, waiting, hoping—the nascent blooms of spring I spotted today, elbowing their way through cracks between the rocks, insisting on their due of sunshine, and time ceaselessly shifts...
For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve kept a notebook, filling dozens of them over the years. Some I still have, others I’ve mislaid or tossed. My notebooks, both the online and paper versions, serve a hybrid function—as a fiction workplace for story ideas, character sketches, plot premises, what-ifs; and also as a therapy couch for my thoughts and feelings, for the highlights and lowlights of...
In my novel, In Flight, the main character, Robert Besch, suffers from a severe psychological disturbance called dissociative fugue—“a form of amnesia characterized by temporary loss of your identity and unplanned travel or wandering without apparent purpose.” It is typically triggered by extreme stress or emotional trauma. Robert survives a harrowing plane crash and risks his life to save fellow...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the U.S. scientific and regulatory agency that studies and predicts changes in the environment. The agency’s mission includes weather forecasts, storm warnings, and climate monitoring. Management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Prevention and control of invasive species. International cooperation. NOAA also collects, analyzes, and...
The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water...
I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found compelling. It’s simply an opportunity for me to point out excellent...
It’s never too late to go back to school to learn something new, and with that in mind I enrolled in the UC Berkeley course “Wealth and Poverty” taught by the economist Robert Reich. The course consisted of fourteen lectures, recorded in a classroom at Berkeley in 2023, and is now free to the public. Reich in action teaching his class. Reich worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford...
Where the sky and sea and shore converge upon a single color: silver–how inspired a child would be to write a poem, but no word in the world rhymes with silver, so go with silverish or even silvery: a view so brilliantly silvery we are compelled to gaze upon its mystery–it’s not visual trickery but rather nature’s cast spell of subtle bewitchery.Pacific Ocean South of San Francisco
The police stopped by my house today. I happened to be looking out the window when the unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway. I say unmarked because the car didn’t have the aggressive black and white badging of Bethlehem’s patrol cars, although the matte-black Challenger with the extra antenna and “hidden” lights on the grill and inside the windshield is obviously a law enforcement vehicle. Two...
