“And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote; we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm.”Martin Luther King Photo by Steve Schapiro Sadly for Martin Luther King, Jr., even the first part of his desire—to register and vote—is beyond reach. The second part about creating leaders who...
Even though the temperature befitted an Ice Age day, I needed my daily dose of fresh air and exercise, and so into a nature preserve I ventured and began walking along a snowy and icy trail. My mind began to wander, daydreaming like I tend to do, and then I realized I’d gotten turned around and wasn’t sure which trail I was on or direction headed. I experienced this weird sensation of a time...
Like everyone else, I’ve been impacted by Covid, although I haven’t had it yet (that I know of). And like every other writer, I’ve had a fair amount to say about Covid. At one point I was wondering why characters in a novel I was working on weren’t socially distancing or masking. I waffled on whether to include a crowded cocktail party scene—even though the novel takes place before the pandemic...
Black coffee wisping steam and a task list on my mind for the day. I’m hoping for a good one, with stretches of purpose and productivity, because I hate to admit yesterday scored low on the getting-things-done meter. Last night’s sleep: less than satisfactory but could have been worse. I’m here, I’ve shown up early. That alone is a check on the list. I nonchalantly part the curtain and almost...
Just the kind of day you want for a run, in the woods, by the stream, past peak, sun doing its trick slanting through the trees. Fallen leaves conceal roots and ruts on the trail and other spots are muddy and slick, and I have to pay attention more than usual, focus where my foot will land and the trail will bend, that’s called being in the moment, said to be good for you, and I don’t fall, this...
Savvy guy that I am, I use Google Alerts to catch any mentions of my novels STASH and CLEAN BREAK out there in the Internet cosmos. Just in case someone, somewhere, read one of these two cool books and wanted to tell the world. I’d want to know about it. I might even get in contact with such a dear reader. So I was pleased to get this alert today for David Klein Stash. Sadly, the alert had...
Devastating and essential are the two words I would use to describe this novel from Richard Powers, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of “The Overstory,” another novel I loved. In “Bewilderment,” Astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life in the cosmos while single-parenting his nine-year-old son, Robin, who is on the spectrum and about to get kicked out of third grade for bashing a fellow...
Who knows where I run across these things (searching, scrolling, clicking–the usual way), but this test of your creative powers is quick and interesting. It’s called the Divergent Association Task and it doesn’t measure all types of creativity, but “one specific type of creativity: divergent thinking, which is the capacity to generate an array of diverse solutions to an...
Someone close to me is feeling in a bad way. They’re suffering from a dark brew of disappointment, sadness, and anxiety. I know because they told me. We sat at a table over a cup of coffee and the coffee went down my throat like battery acid when I looked into their eyes and saw the pain radiating out. It was hard to sit there and hear what they were going through. Of course I was uncomfortable...
On a Sunday morning, early, solitude, coffee, others still asleep above you, thinking about the day ahead and you’ve got things to do but nothing absolutely demanding your attention, you turn and look out the window and get this, pay attention to this. I look back down the arc and get snared in how I chose to spend my time, where I put my energy, to what did I devote my minutes, hours, days...
I am calm too
Every so often, not very often, I get out of my own head and observe. Not to gather information and form impressions and make assessments, and not to judge and plot and scheme, but to leave all of that behind and do nothing other than experience sunlight glitter on a stream in a way I’ve never noticed. It’s only a moment or two of my attention but for that moment my breath stops when I realize...
Today marks two years I’ve been fiddling around with this blogging thing. That’s not really an anniversary cake. I’ve co-opted Harriet’s birthday cake again. She baked it herself, but at least I made the icing and frosted the cake. Taking a couple of hours (or less or more) to write a blog post is so unlike the two-year trial of writing a novel that it’s hard to...
I’m really pissed off about the thumping that critical race theory is taking from its enemies. Funny thing is, about a year ago few people outside of academia had ever heard of critical race theory (CRT). Now, almost everyone has, because the conservative right wing has labeled it subversive and threatening (Threatening to what? White supremacy). CRT got its start around 1980 when researchers and...
Some days pass in a whirl of imagination and others are taskmasters hounding me and I get near the end and not once have I taken a moment for beauty, but if I’m lucky and I remember and my timing is right I look a little outside myself and the world shakes me by shoulders and says pay attention fool, the sunset is your favorite color.
