I walk into this view and greedily soak in every color and texture until I’m drunk on beauty, cool sand beneath my feet, demure waves rippling onto shore and out again, sun spraying the sky pink and casting golden upon the water, a solitary bird my companion, the horizon and the tree line the extent of my world. I want to appreciate this moment completely and I also want to take a photo for...
I must have been six or seven years old, hopefully not nine or ten. Our family was at Crystal Beach, an amusement park located on the shore of Lake Erie in Ontario. We went there once every summer, having earned ride tickets based on the grades we got on our report cards. My older siblings were going on the Magic Carpet, a walk-through funhouse with crooked rooms, funny mirrors, moving walls...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
