Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
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...
I’m a generation too far removed to have embraced video games. The extent of my game knowledge comes from occasionally looking over Owen’s shoulder to see what’s on the screen and asking questions about the characters and game objectives. Then I picked up the bestselling novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. This easy-to-read and well-crafted story centers on Sadie and...
I didn’t tell you what happened on my winter hike the other day. How when you’re fatigued and disoriented, your mind can play tricks. Earlier, when starting out, I was tuned to the environment. The trails were marked with colored disks, and the surface was packed snow and ice. I breathed in the cold air, the freshness of the outdoors. I took in the trail and bare trees and snowy terrain, the...
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...
You might have heard that artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over the world. Or my world, anyway. There are now dozens of AI tools that will write for you. Writing may be my profession and my passion, but if AI can write better than I can, I may be looking for a new line of work. The AI I tried is called Rytr. I think that word is pronounced “Writer.” Very clever. I had to do some...
Not to be mean-hearted to the grieving or entirely self-serving, but I’ve discovered an upside when I hear about artists’ deaths. Recently, the American novelist Russell Banks died. Some years back I read one of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter, and found it compelling and intelligent. When I heard of his death, I remembered that his novel, Affliction, was sitting on my bookshelf. I don’t...
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’m willing to put down books before I reach the end. I used to suffer from a “finish what you start” syndrome, and I would keep hoping the book would turn the corner and start to captivate me. It rarely did. One reason I’m quicker to move on to a different book is a few years back I calculated how many more books I might read in my lifetime, factoring in average male longevity and my reading...
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...
I have Harriet to thank for this one. She asked me and a few others in our circle if we wanted to join her in registering for the Helderberg-to-Hudson half marathon scheduled for April. I initially scoffed at the idea. My days as a runner have been dwindling in recent years. Various age, injury, overuse, and motivational factors have taken their toll on my “elite runner” status. It was almost...
Last week I saw the film The Banshees of Inisherin and the other night it won the Golden Globe award for “best picture, musical or comedy.” Best musical or comedy? One of the characters plays the fiddle, but this is no musical. And I did laugh a few times during the film, although given my stunned and sad state after leaving the theater, I would never classify what I saw as a comedy. But did the...
Here’s another post from my favorite guest blogger, Julia Klein. It’s a new year. For many of us, that means New Year’s resolutions. People resolve that this year is going to be the one where they “get healthy.” Although striving to improve our health is a worthy cause, it is often twisted by diet culture. Our cultural rhetoric around health has shifted. In recent years, diet culture...
As a Buffalo native and a lifelong Bills fan, I was watching the Bills-Bengals game with Owen last Monday night between two premier NFL teams fighting for playoff positioning. We saw Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapse on the field. By now, most of the country knows what happened: after making a hard tackle on a Cincinnati receiver, Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest. The Bills training staff and...
In a previous blog post, I pondered whether New Year’s resolutions are helpful. Most resolutions fail because most are focused on self-sacrifice and self-improvement, and that stuff is really hard. As Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Atlantic, it makes sense that such resolutions rarely succeed: “If meeting self-improvement goals were so easy, we wouldn’t need to make resolutions in the first...
Dear Cherished Readers: It’s that time of year again: the end. Which can only mean it’s time for all the “best of the year lists.” Best books, best movies, best albums, best hockey goals, best startups, best advice . . . There are a lot of “best of” lists! Did you ever wonder who compiles these lists? Who gets to decide what’s the best? It’s a subjective...
Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere—and therefore the longest and darkest night. I’m thinking about light. Not the demure natural light of the low sun on this day, but the artificial light we use to beat back the darkness. In my safe, residential neighborhood of mostly single-family houses, I am surrounded by light on all sides. The neighboring...
While I was listening to a podcast, an advertisement came on for a company called BetterHelp, offering me 10 percent off my first month’s subscription. Subscription to what? Therapy, delivered online or over the phone. The pitch started like this: Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with a user manual, so when it’s not working for you it’s normal to feel stuck. Therapists are trained to help you...
I’m sitting at my desk hearing icicles break off from my roof edge and crash to the ground during the winter storm that’s passing through, and I’m reminded of the time I almost won a Darwin Award. For those who don’t know Darwin Awards, they are given out to “commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate...
The world may not need one more take on season two of Mike White’s The White Lotus, but it’s getting mine anyway. The seven-episode season on HBO lands in what I consider a sweet spot in storytelling length—about six to eight hours of programming. This length also works well for adapting novels to the screen, which rarely transfer in any satisfying way to a two-hour feature film, but gain...
My daughter Julia is one of those people in my life I want to check in with every day. Not to keep tabs on her, or her on me, but because deliberately and proactively thinking of the people I love the most is time well spent. Enter Snapchat, that simple social media platform that claims it’s the easiest way to share a moment. Snap a photo, usually a selfie, add an optional caption, and send...
