All it takes is one tulip to brighten the landscape and calm my mood. Good thing, because all we got at our house is one damn tulip. One! Over the years, the deer have decimated our tulips, yet somehow the hungry buggers overlooked this one. Our one and only and likely lonely tulip. Fortunately, we have the Tulip Festival in Washington Park coming up. We went to gaze at the blooms yesterday...
Dandelion season is my lawn at its finest with a constellation of little golden suns on a spring green canvas. I wish it could last all summer. The blooms set at night and rise in the morning and shine all day, but only for a few weeks, and then the flowers are gone to seed, and a lucky few of them will be new suns next year.
April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday, circa sometime in the late 1960s. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s house in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato plants with swollen red fruit. From left...
What is it about skating on a frozen pond that makes me feel poetic? There was “Skating on a Winter Night” a few years ago with Owen and my friends when we had sticks and pucks. And then there was this past weekend on Black Creek Marsh. We had to hike a snowy trail down to the windswept ice and we tested its thickness, walking out on the surface, gingerly, one step and then another...
It doesn’t happen often enough but when the sun comes out during the winter, I’m compelled to have its rays upon me. The bare trees cooperate by letting more of the light land on me. Bennett Hill is just fifteen minutes from my house and a favorite hike because of its well-marked trails, a dose of steepness, and its winter landscape of gray and white and brown. Bare trees cast long...
This is what’s known as a teaser: I show you the cover of my next book and let you read an excerpt to get you excited about purchasing the novel when it’s published in the very near future.
Below is the cover. Here is the first chapter. Enjoy!
I have a musician friend who performs covers and now is trying his hand at writing his own songs, in particular love songs of the singer-songwriter variety. He asked me if I wanted to come up with some lyrics for him. Knowing little about music and even less about songwriting, I asked him the chicken and egg question: what comes first, the tune or the lyrics? The answer is what I knew it would...
“. . . an engrossing read.” “. . . a compelling story, beautifully written.” “I didn’t want it to end.” These are a few statements that reviewers wrote about my latest novel, The Culling. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, or if you haven’t browbeaten all of your family, friends, neighbors, and strangers you run into on the street to get and read their own copy of The Culling, you still have...
Thirty-three years ago today I was living in Santa Cruz, California, and endured the devastation of the Loma Prieta earthquake and—ironically or symbolically—the end of a long term relationship on that same day. It sucked. People died and hearts hurt and I was lost and struggling as a still unpublished writer. The ruins from the earthquake in Santa Cruz 33 years ago today. Today I experienced the...
I’m not someone who feels especially embedded in my community, even though mental health experts say a sense of community is important to well-being. So I’d been meaning to find ways to get more involved locally, because I always listen to what the experts say. I volunteered for the crew to help artist Fernando Orellana paint a new mural on the rail trail that runs near my house. The mural was a...
I am stressed about our sugar maple under duress. Was it sixteen or eighteen years ago we planted it—I’m not so good at record keeping. We’ve watched the tree grow and every autumn its leaves have kept their promise. Sugar maples are experts at that. Every year I’m thinking I’ve never seen a more beautiful tree. I’ll take just one more photo. Growing. Growing. Bowing before its glory. The thick...
Hey there—if you’re looking for a hot, page-turning beach read to cap the summer season, I’ve just published my third novel: “The Culling.” This dystopian thriller is about a woman on the run from an unjust death sentence who teams up with the mercenary assigned to hunt her in an attempt to escape and join the resistance against the authoritarian regime. Think of it as Shirley...
Sometimes the stars align and we’re all at home and in the mood to watch a movie as a family. This time we went old school and sat down to the iconic horror film “The Shining”, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel by Stephen King. From Rotten Tomatoes: “Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to cure his...
