Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
It’s early morning and I’m walking along the Lake Erie shoreline in an area of private beach-front homes. These are big windowed structures built on high slopes and protected by rock walls from the destructive force of Great Lakes storms. I sense I’m being watched and I look up and see someone on a screened porch. Maybe it’s someone who sits every morning with their coffee enjoying their view of...
Many companies invest time, energy, and resources into defining their core values. They look deep inside their own teams, they talk to customers, they evaluate their business goals. From this research, thinking, and collective brainstorming emerge a defined set of values. Maybe there are three of them. Maybe five. Hopefully not more than that because who could live up to so many values? Once...
A couple of years ago, a writer friend told me that soon artificial intelligence will be writing better fiction than we can. I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I didn’t forget his words. On the bright side, it prompted me to write two new novels: The Culling and In Flight. Perhaps I was trying to get something accomplished before I became obsolete. That day might be approaching. Generative AI...
There’s nothing special or particularly inventive about starting with the ending when telling a story. We do it ourselves in the real world all the time. Who among us hasn’t started a story: “Mom, Dad, I’m calling from the police station.” “Okay, son, you better tell us what happened.” And the details leading up to that moment unfold. In the storytelling arts, beginning with the end is an...
Sharks bit three people last week off the beaches of Long Island. The Robert Moses State Park Field Beach was briefly closed on July 4 following a shark sighting. Swimming was banned at several Nantucket beaches earlier this week after great white sharks were spotted in the area. It’s Jaws all over again! Which is why H & I joined a friend to see the original movie when it was playing on the...
The world is on fire, smoke stifles the air, thunderstorms knock out power, the humidity feels like slime–and the garden is happy.
Almost 60 million adults in the U.S. are living in multigenerational family households, according to data from The Pew Research Center. It’s four times the number that did so in 1971. The percentage share also more than doubled, to 18% of the U.S. population. Disclosure: I live in one of these multigenerational family households. Both of our young adult employed college graduates are living in...
I’m not usually one for patting myself on the back, but I know I did one thing right as a parent: fostered a love of reading in both of our kids. It began with countless hours of Harriet and I reading to the kids when they were young, then came the phase of pressing upon them to read this or that book I thought they’d appreciate, and now we’re in what I call the era of reciprocity: now they’re...
My siblings and I jointly own a summer cottage in Canada that my father left to us in his will. Growing up in Buffalo, we spent our summers in Canada, in our early years at a place we called Three Acres upon which my father and his buddies hand-built six very rustic cottages in the 1950s. Our current cottage Old cottage Almost fifty years later my dad upgraded to a new place—bigger, with reliable...
It has to be a coincidence. Randomness on display. One world is fiction and the other is real. But something just happened to me that is eerily reminiscent of what happened to the character Robert Besch in my novel In Flight. In the book, after the news spreads that the Plane-Crash Hero had suffered from a dissociative fugue, all kinds of strangers begin contacting Robert. From the novel: There...
1. I’m on my bike riding through a residential neighborhood, zipping down one of the only hills in Bethlehem to gain enough speed to climb up the other side. Ahead of me, I spot two other riders, a man and a woman heading in my direction. They’re on my side of the road. Someone has to move to the other side, and it should be them. They just keep on coming in my direct path. I take a quick look...
I visited with a book group that read In Flight. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with a book group and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the experience (hey, readers talking about my novels—what’s not to enjoy). But I’d forgotten about the first question many readers ask: “How did you get the idea?” No matter how many times I’m asked that question, and no matter which of my novels is being...
The family is together. We’re heading to a birthday party on Long Island. I’m driving seventy-five miles an hour southbound on the New York State Thruway and the hybrid warning light comes on the dashboard with the command to TURN OFF ENGINE. The car immediately loses power. This happens right where Route 17 South merges with the Thruway, five lanes of traffic coming together and we’re in the...
I’m mesmerized by kinetic art—the sculpture that spins, the mobile that sways—and because of that I’m compelled to hang windows in our yard. Every window is a world, and when a window is suspended, when a window floats or sways in the breeze, another facet of that world is yours to behold. My first kinetic window I sourced from the double-hung I saved from our bathroom remodel. It had the old...
He wrote one of the most powerful, memorable novels I have ever read—The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2007—and now he’s dead. Cormac McCarthy, age 89. The Road is a simple story: a father and his young son traverse a post-Apocalyptic world in search of . . . what they are searching for is not explicitly stated. Safety. Humanity. Hope. The next breath. Like very few novels, The Road...
Within walking distance or a short bike ride from our place in Thunder Bay are a number of tennis courts. I pass by them and am reminded of another era, the 1970s when most of these courts were probably installed and tennis was booming on the global stage. The big stars back then were Bjorn Borg, Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Billie Jean King, and Chris Everett. Bob Klein, serving big...
Where Thunder Bay comes to a rocky point I came upon a cairn along the shore. I’d say this is an intentional design—a creature on sturdy legs with arms spread taking in the wide expanse of the lake. It’s a finished work, but I’m tempted to add my own flair, to say I was here too and admired your art. If you look closely you can see what I did, a little weight for each...
The pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Getaway, A Hell of a Woman—and many more) said, “There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.” And to realize that truth about fiction, chances are you have to read to the end of a book. The ending is the most important part of any novel—because no one reads a book to find out what happens in the middle. I’ve been hearing from some...
My transformation started innocently enough. I was scrolling through my news feed and came across this headline: “5 Zodiac Signs That Thrive Under Pressure.” The last time I paid attention to my zodiac sign was probably fifty years ago—I’m a Capricorn (December 25)—when I would read my horoscope every morning in the long-defunct Buffalo morning newspaper, The Courier Express. It was fun. Not to...
My sister Susan once said she felt compelled to finish a book once she started reading it, even if she wasn’t enjoying it. I advised her otherwise. I told her I had calculated how many books I had left to read in my life given my reading rate and average expected life span. It wasn’t nearly as many as I wanted it to be. Since then, my sister started putting books down she didn’t love. And then...
