Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
A BURNING is a promising debut by author Megha Majumdar. Set in India, the novel weaves together the stories of three characters. Jivan is a young Muslim woman from the slums who is wrongly arrested and jailed for the terrorist act of burning a passenger train. Lovely is a transgender woman known to Jivan and pursuing her dreams of becoming an actress. And PT Sir is a school physical education...
I’m not sure New Year’s resolutions are helpful, but I’ve made one that has to do with clothing. I own a Life is Good® shirt I received as a gift some years ago. The shirt is casual stylish: khaki-green, a lone button a different color than the others, and this cool vertical stitching that if you get close enough (you won’t) reads “Do what you like. Like what you do.®” I seem to...
Dear Cherished Readers: It’s time for end-of-year lists. The top books, the most popular songs, the best movies. The important cultural milestones and the leading news events. The people we’ve lost. I like these lists so I can find out what I’ve missed and what I’ve remembered. There’s an end-of-year list for just about everything, including my blog posts. From the 156 posts published in 2021...
One birthday wish came from an elementary school classmate I haven’t seen or spoken to in over 50 years. Another wish was from a local friend I’d seen just the night before. Then there was the old California friend who I seldom saw even when I lived in California. A former colleague from 25 years ago wished me the best of birthdays. A cousin I unfriended a couple of years ago because I kept...
I’m reposting this from last year in honor of Joan Didion, an incredible writer who died yesterday at the age of 87. The reason she wrote is the reason I write. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The author of that line, Joan Didion, is a rare breed in America: a literary writer with rock star status. I finally had the pleasure of watching the 2017 Netflix documentary about...
The Greek philosopher Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I was drawn to this quote and its meaning when writing FLIGHT RISK. In the novel, successful, happily married man and devoted father Robert Besch is traveling for business when he survives a deadly plane crash. He manages to rescue fellow passengers from the burning plane, but suffers a rare dissociative fugue...
I’m not the only writer in the family. My daughter, Julia Klein, has a bachelor’s degree in Nutrition Science and is working on her master’s degree in Applied Nutrition to become a registered dietitian. She contributed this guest post, just in time for the holidays. It’s the holiday season, which for some of us means increased anxiety around food. Holiday celebrations are often...
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...
I have a friend and colleague who recently wrote a blog post in which he admitted he wasn’t a confident person, and that self-doubt was always present in him. I was completely taken aback by his admission. Some people wear their self-doubt on their sleeves. They’re indecisive, or when they do make a decision are often consumed with a sense of buyer’s remorse that they’d made the wrong choice. Or...
Louise Erdrich is one of the most admired American authors and arguably the Queen of Native American Literature. I was awed back in 1984 by her debut novel, LOVE MEDICINE. It was my introduction to a novel in stories, without a central plot. Over the years, I’ve read a few of her other novels, and as good as they were, none of them made the same impression on me. Nothing like the first kiss, as...
Someone close to me was telling me he was a failure. He was bemoaning mistakes he’s made, wrong things he’s said, goals he’s fallen short of reaching. It was painful to hear him talking this way, but probably not as painful as it was for him to voice these feelings. If you have a narrative running through your head that is constantly berating you, if you feel like a loser, if you’ve been hurt...
Today is the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the day that officially drew the United States into World War II, what President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date that will live in infamy.” There was a news story today on the Bidens visiting the World War II memorial in Washington. Profiles on a few remaining survivors. Articles about that day in history. And...
Thanks to Julia enlightening me, I now know what it means to be a highly sensitive person. At first, the phrase “highly sensitive” carried negative connotations for me. I remember my mother once told me during my ornery teenage years I was too sensitive, likely in relation to my taking quick and excessive offense to a perceived slight or critical comment. That’s just being thin-skinned, which is...
This is the time of year when media outlets that review books come out with their best-of-the-year lists. I compared the top ten books of 2021 as determined by the editors at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Amazon. What’s clear to me is there is very little consensus on what the top ten books are, which is not surprising for a number of reasons. First, there...
I’ve always been a dreamer. Yes, the person who has (had) moonshot aspirations, but I’m talking about being a nighttime dreamer when my unconscious goes into rogue storytelling mode. Every. Single. Night. As a kid, I had recurring nightmares. As an adult, my dreams are invariably unsettling. There aren’t too many picnics and butterflies in my dreams. Since we all dream, you would think...
Alize slipped into a crevice between two boulders and shimmied to the top of the taller one. She sat cross-legged on her perch, raised her binoculars, and glassed the length of the pipeline, from north to south and back north again, then adjusted her viewing angle and scanned the western exposure beyond the pipeline into the dry, beige distance: washed-out rock and baked earth and sagebrush, long...
The other day I went for a run (some walking) at a trail network in town called Normanskill Ravine. True to its name, the single-track trail is steep. It doesn’t just go down into one ravine, but leads through a series of drops and climbs and switchbacks that lead you to the Normanskill, where you run flat along the creek for a while before looping back through long ascents and descents. Three...
“It was a pleasure to burn.” So thought Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451,” as he hosed kerosene onto a burning pile of books. Montag has good company in contemporary America. Two members of a Virginia school board recently called for a book burning of “sexually explicit” books. A school board member in Florida demanded that someone must be...
I’ve been in a philosophical mood recently, at times contemplating the meaning of life, and therefore have supplemented my usual reading of fiction with two books atypical for me: David Benatar’s THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT and Victor E. Frankl’s MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. Both books operate from the premise that life is inherently meaningless, that there is no cosmic purpose to our lives, and the...
