Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
We’re practicing in the park across from the Zoo in the big meadow next to the golf course. Our Coach, Duke Donovan, has us run tackling drills over mud puddles. He blows his whistle and says huddle up men. It’s either a dirty joke or three laps for the fumble on the last play. We circle around, 11- and 12-year-olds of the St. Mark’s Lions 90-pound football team. He’s probably 30, younger than...
I’ve been a father who doesn’t take his heart condition seriously but instead focuses on preventing his daughter from marrying a man he doesn’t approve of. I’ve been his daughter, a recent college graduate who meets the wrong kind of guy and slides into drug and alcohol abuse. I’ve been that wrong kind of guy who isn’t an awful person but will manipulate others to achieve his goals. I’ve been a...
How do you discover the next book to read? For me, I look at my to-be-read pile teetering on the edge of my desk or my written list and choose from there, but the pile and list have origin stories as well. I read the New York Times Book Review every Sunday and receive the NYT Book Briefing newsletter and newsletters from several bookstores. Fellow readers who I trust make recommendations...
You asked me how I decided to become a creative writer. The four of us were sitting outside finishing our lunch, the chill creeping in, and your question caught me by surprise. It shouldn’t have, since I’m sure you’re in the throes of deciding what to do next with your life and it makes sense to ask others how they decided about theirs. Although I’ve been asked this question often enough, I...
Just the kind of day you want for a run, in the woods, by the stream, past peak, sun doing its trick slanting through the trees. Fallen leaves conceal roots and ruts on the trail and other spots are muddy and slick, and I have to pay attention more than usual, focus where my foot will land and the trail will bend, that’s called being in the moment, said to be good for you, and I don’t fall, this...
The most controversial item on the election ballot in the Town of Bethlehem this past Tuesday was Proposition 6. If passed, a 1.3 mile stretch of busy four-lane road between Elsmere Ave. and the Albany city line would undergo a “Road Diet,” funded primarily by federal and state money. Four traffic lanes would be reduced to two—one in each direction—plus a center turn lane, dedicated bicycle lanes...
They told their son he could become anything he wanted, and when he wanted to become a poet, they held their tongues and supported his dream. But now he was 27 years old, chronically underemployed, and didn’t seem to produce much work. Every three weeks or so the son would read to his parents a poem he wrote, and frankly, they usually didn’t understand it. The poems might have been lyrical, but...
Another corporate giant has rebranded itself. Facebook the company is now Meta the company. I suppose it had to be done because of brand confusion. Facebook was the name of the company as well as the name of the app used by billions of people. It’s similar to when Google the company became Alphabet the company, and Google remained one of Alphabet’s platforms. So why now? Many observers...
It started with brushing my teeth left-handed. At first, my movements were clumsy, and I feared I wasn’t getting off all the tartar, and the dentist would reprimand me on my next visit. Also, I discovered when I employed my left arm, my dominant right just hung there like a drooping, effete claw. Accustomed to carrying all the workload, my right didn’t know what the hell was going on. With...
Dear Boss: We have a problem that is impacting productivity: I had six meetings today. That pretty much shot my entire workday. A meeting on budgeting, two separate marketing meetings, a meeting on organizational reporting structure, a meeting on product strategy, a meeting on Halloween decorations. I didn’t attend that last meeting on decorating, but I was invited because the organizer wanted a...
Savvy guy that I am, I use Google Alerts to catch any mentions of my novels STASH and CLEAN BREAK out there in the Internet cosmos. Just in case someone, somewhere, read one of these two cool books and wanted to tell the world. I’d want to know about it. I might even get in contact with such a dear reader. So I was pleased to get this alert today for David Klein Stash. Sadly, the alert had...
When I hear the word artifact I picture a shard of pottery or a primitive tool that gets unearthed during an archeological dig. Collection of objects was found by divers in the Tollense River in Germany and is probably the contents of a personal pouch of a warrior who died 3,300 years ago on the battlefield. Credit: Volker Minkus But I knew this wasn’t the definition of artifact that began to...
She’s 22, he’s 21. Both are completing their last semester of college, set to graduate in December. In their level of intellect, emotional maturity, and self-awareness, they’re light years ahead of where I was at that age, exposed to so much more, in some ways forced to grow up a lot faster, yet better protected in others. He reads more than 50 books a year and approaches life with curiosity...
Devastating and essential are the two words I would use to describe this novel from Richard Powers, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of “The Overstory,” another novel I loved. In “Bewilderment,” Astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life in the cosmos while single-parenting his nine-year-old son, Robin, who is on the spectrum and about to get kicked out of third grade for bashing a fellow...
They came for me during the night, ringing the doorbell as if they were polite visitors. I’d been expecting them. I kept my clothes by the side of my bed so I could dress quickly. I raised the bedroom window, straddled the sill, and stepped out onto the steep gabled roof, steadying my balance. From there I could just reach a limb of the sugar maple and swing myself into the thickness of its...
Las Vegas Raiders Coach Jon Gruden resigned yesterday. After a few middling years with Gruden at the helm, his team was pretty good this season, with a 3-2 record, but he was the victim of an obvious yet well-executed hit job. Brief background: The NFL has been investigating the Washington Football Team (nee Washington Redskins) for sexual harassment and verbal abuse of female employees, a...
Who knows where I run across these things (searching, scrolling, clicking–the usual way), but this test of your creative powers is quick and interesting. It’s called the Divergent Association Task and it doesn’t measure all types of creativity, but “one specific type of creativity: divergent thinking, which is the capacity to generate an array of diverse solutions to an...
I revisited this novel I first read in college because a new movie will soon be released. I’ve never been an avid sci fi or fantasy reader, but I remember Dune having a big impact on me. It’s the story of the teenage Paul Atreides whose family is sent by the Emperor to rule the fearsome desert planet Arrakis, the universe’s single source of mélange, a highly addictive spice-drug that prolongs...
If my sister hadn’t texted me last night I wouldn’t have remembered it was the date my father, Bob Klein, died in 2014. The day has slipped my mind the last few years. That’s never the case regarding my mother, who died on July 9, 1983, when she was only 58. Almost 40 years ago, yet I see that day approaching every year like a dark cloud on the horizon. I think it’s because I was young—and so was...
Are you one of those people who was raised to be an achiever? To be productive and useful above all else? If you are, you might experience angst when it comes to leisure time. Dr. Laurie Santos, the Yale professor who taught a class I took last year called “The Science of Happiness,” admits to filling most of her time with work-related and product activities and that she worries that “fun is just...
