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
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...
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...
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...
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...
Have you not known the crushing burden and weightlessness of intense desire for someone or something. The wanting, the longing, the waiting, the hoping, the whirlpooling and churning inside you, the straining of your composure when you can’t affect the outcome, when no voodoo or charms or superstitions or prayers will help. You can only wait for fortuity to turn you way. You have no control. You...
So much on the homestead list during this seasonal change and only a few hours allotted today, putting away the patio furniture and raking and getting the storm windows washed and up, and damn if one of the sills isn’t chipped and needs to be painted and on another window the exterior casing is coming off and must be tightened up, these extra tasks biting into my time, I’m not going to get done...
At the opposite end of the spectrum from those 100,000-word novels I tend to write are six-word stories I also enjoy. One of the most famous six-word stories ever written, and perhaps the most devastating, is by Ernest Hemingway. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I’ve written six-word memoirs and six-word Covid stories. Now here are twenty new ones. You should try it. Six...
On a secluded mountain lake, a silent, cool morning, I am compelled by reality’s transient and illusory nature. The simultaneous coexistence of two states: the object and its mirrored image. The reflection is and is not reality. Both conditions feel true. Like our own reflections in the mirror: it’s us but not us. The two worlds feel equally real, equally important. And so I pay close...
We’re in Snyder’s Shoes in Manistee along the shore of Lake Michigan, where we vacationed with the family for many years when the kids were young and spent a week with Harriet’s sister. The two photos (taken 15 years apart) were an annual tradition. We posed with a statue of the tallest man who ever lived. Robert Wadlow stood 8 ft. 11 inches and survived until only age 22, dying in 1940. He...
My head is in the clouds and I’m in daydreaming mode, for how long I cannot tell, but worry not, I’m not delusional or illogical or unaware of what’s going on. In fact I’m all too aware, and my head in the clouds at least means I’m looking up, so there’s that. Give me the towering gray nimbus or the distant hazy puffs or the cirrus whisps. I’m not an uninterrupted blue sky kind of guy. I...
Even the blank page gets in on the fun. Write here, one says. No, start on me, entices another. Fickle pages, how they flirt, each desiring to be the chosen one, to have their lines sown with inky words. I can’t decide. I’ll let the wind choose: whichever way it blows me, that’s the way I’ll go.
Who doesn’t want a hot read for a hot summer? My fifth novel, THE SUITOR, is available starting today. Get your copy on Amazon—paper or eBook—and more copies for your friends and family. And if you’re feeling generous, write an Amazon review of the book. Thank you—and I hope your summer is off to a sizzling start. Get THE SUITOR here.
Dear Readers: My newest novel, THE SUITOR, will be published next week, June 20, and available on Amazon in eBook or print format. I know that’s only six days away, but you probably can’t wait, so here’s a link to the first chapter. What’s this story about, you ask? Here’s the logline: When a recent college graduate suddenly falls in love with an ambitious schemer...
This time of year when the trees leaf out I remember the American elm in front of my house when I was a kid. Its limbs flared toward the sky like an elegant vase, the branches and leaves spreading a canopy as wide as the tree’s height. The flat, egg-shaped seeds covered our sidewalk and driveway. Then Dutch elm disease made its way to Buffalo, and the elms lining our street withered and the city...
