Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
The year is 1906. The location is the priory of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in upstate New York. Mariette Baptiste is a beautiful 17-year-old postulant when she joins the order, against the wishes of her father. She quickly becomes a favorite of the other sisters until she begins to exhibit signs of the stigmata — bleeding from locations of Christ’s wounds when he was nailed to the cross.Some...
This time of year during this still-wintery month, when the clocks have changed and I’m often up early and at my desk while darkness still grips the sky, I may be rewarded at dawn by a dramatic display of color and contrast, perhaps a painter’s dream, so quickly come and gone yet reminding me the dark will give way, the world may not be as bad as it seems, and even if nothing else shines my way...
A few years ago, I tapped two maple trees on my property, collected sap, and boiled it outside on a single-burner hotplate to make syrup. With a ratio of 40 gallons of sap needed to create one gallon of syrup, I ended up with about eight ounces of maple syrup—enough for a couple of pancake breakfasts. It was a classic situation of the effort not equaling the reward. But over this past weekend I...
On my own for a couple of weeks, I’ve been finding things to do beyond my usual routines. Last night I went to watch the girls varsity basketball team from our local high school—Bethlehem Central—take on Troy in a playoff championship game. I knew nothing about the team. I hadn’t followed them. Only through a quick pre-game search did I discover the Eagles had finished a weak regular season with...
There comes a time in life when a person acquires a pill case. That time has come for me. I used to think pill cases were only for old people or the very ill who took lots of meds daily or for those who are supplement-crazed. It’s true I’m trending older, but I take only one prescription medication, and just three times a week. I pop a daily low-dose aspirin, and not having seen much sun this...
It is not without trepidation that I make an annual pilgrimage to my local Spectrum Theater to see the Oscar-Nominated Short Films—Live Action. What gives me pause is that in recent years, despite the films originating from countries around the world, most of them have been heavy on the tragedy: the boy who drowns in quicksand, the young woman sold into sexual slavery, the family double-crossed...
I’m reading this novel, Light Years, by James Salter, a novelist known for his succinct, luminous prose and his explorations of desire and ambition. He wrote with the precision of Hemingway and the emotional acuity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he carved out a space for his work in twentieth-century literature. Light Years, one of his critically acclaimed works, traces the slow dissolution of a...
Do you ever read a book, or see a movie, or attend a performance, and walk out thinking, “Yeah, that was pretty good.” But then over the next hours and days you keep thinking about it, and the more you think about it, the more you appreciate what you experienced. It’s almost better afterwards, in your memory, than it was in real time. Send Help was that movie for me. Since the sad demise of the...
The spotlight is hot and unrelenting for those Olympic figure skaters. If you’re a downhill skier and you crash or miss a gate, your race is over. If you’re a speed skater and you wipe out on the oval track, you’re finished. But if you’re a figure skater and you mess up or fall, you have to keep going. We were watching the 21-year-old skating phenom Ilia Malinin perform his individual free skate...
I’d never read the old copy of Wuthering Heights on our bookshelf, with the cover frayed and soft at the edges and the pages thin as tissue. But when I heard the movie was coming out I decided to give this novel a read. Published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is an early example of a Gothic novel from the Victorian period. Unlike its contemporary Jane...
You say you have the February blues, induced by the winter browns and grays and whites, the flat palette and the breath-stealing cold and the stinging, relentless wind, and for a while you can sit by the fire and read a good book and work on your puzzles and cook comforting food, but you begin to stir and can’t simply run the clock until spring, you have to stare down the season, but you don’t...
The gallery and arts center MASS MoCA occupies the space of a nineteenth-century textile mill in North Adams, Massachusetts. This week we spent a brutally cold winter day roaming its galleries. Two exhibits stood out to me. Vincent Valdez’s work focuses on identity, social justice, and American History. A number of his oil paintings are done in grayscale, which I’ve not seen often. This one of...
I heard from a reader who got started on STILL LIFE and said that this sentence, which appears on only the second page of the novel, struck him as a perfect sentence: “I imagine the lake, too, through the leafless gap in the trees that winter opened like a cathedral door.” I don’t share this to brag or blow my own horn. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do much of that. If anything, I’m more...
The day you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: the publication of my sixth novel, STILL LIFE, about a young artist whose creative energy and love life go sideways when his estranged father tracks him down. The best way to get your hands on this book (and extra copies for your friends and family) is to order STILL LIFE right here. I hope you like STILL LIFE, will write a review on Amazon...
I dreamt about S. for the third night in a row. I have no idea why. I won’t tell you the details because the dream events are chaotic, surreal in nature, with many jump-cuts and a complete lack of narrative continuity. The way most dreams are. I could never shape the retelling in a way that would make sense or be interesting to you. Plus, other people’s dreams are boring. For the same reasons I...
Another set of lyrics that need to be set to music. I’m playing with the AAA-BBB-CCC-etc. rhyming pattern and trying to disguise a theme. You’re lovely tonight in my favorite blueAnd then you do the thing that you doBreak my heart I’ll always be true Oh special one, my endless devotionLost like a boat adrift on the oceanDeep in the haze of your magic potion Not made for each other but...
Not only did my beloved Buffalo Bills suffer yet another brutal and heartbreaking playoff loss, but they followed it with what I believe is a major organizational blunder. Fans of the team saw how controversial officiating calls led directly to this gritty team losing to the Denver Broncos in the divisional round of the playoffs. Sure, the team made many mistakes of their own, turning the ball...
You know when friends send you links and say you have to read this or watch that, and maybe sometimes you do? Well, a writer friend sent me a link to British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I wasted no time watching it from beginning to end, forty-nine minutes. Ishiguro is one of my favorite writers. I’ve read all eight of his novels and his one...
The dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1949. It was assigned as part of the English curriculum in my high school. I still have a copy of the novel on my bookshelf, and I reread it a few years ago. The totalitarian society depicted is led by the dictator Big Brother and supported by mass surveillance and the Thought Police, which publishes a steady stream of propaganda and...
My upcoming novel, Still Life, took 33 years to write. That’s not a typo. With half a dozen published novels already behind me, my average time from concept to conclusion was about two years—one year for a first draft, another year for a bunch more drafts. So what the hell happened this time? In a previous century, in the year 1992, I wrote a short story titled “The Painter’s Son,” in which an...
