Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
I need to be mentally and physically sharp for a big day tomorrow. I’m in bed and lights out at 10:32, but I’m thinking about tomorrow’s schedule and so I don’t fall asleep until sometime near midnight. A dream not worth recounting. Awake. Tossing. I only use eight of the twelve phrases that “socially intelligent people use to make an instant connection.” I should be better than that. The outdoor...
Another autumn hike in the mountains. On our last hike in the Adirondacks we showed up early for peak fall color. This week in the Catskills we arrived a little late. Still, these mountains around me are breathtaking under any conditions. The three Catskill peaks of Blackhead, Black Dome, and Thomas Cole are familiar sights to me. An ascent to Windham High Peak, followed by meandering through the...
“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” So says femme fatale Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) to inept but cocky lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) when they first meet in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 directorial debut, the steamy noir film Body Heat. Matty’s pronouncement on Ned’s intelligence sets the stage for what’s to come: she convinces Ned to help her murder her husband so she can...
Dear Gillette: I remember a time not that long ago Harriet would tell me how good I smelled after I shaved. Now? Silence. And for that, I am turning in my loyalty card to your Gillette Foamy shaving cream. I gotta tell you, that stuff stinks now. Whatever you did to the formula, you messed up badly. In case you think I’m simply a disgruntled old drip who’s resistant to change, I’m not the only...
I have a friend who doesn’t want to read books or watch shows or movies that are sad or involve tragic circumstances. It’s a form of curation: she doesn’t need that negativity in her life, doesn’t want to be exposed to those feelings because it interferes with her happiness. I’m the opposite. I find sad, depressing, painful, tragic stories to be essential to my own quest for well-being. These...
One of my joys of summer is taking a hot, sweaty run and finishing on the shores of Lake Erie where I pull off my shirt and shoes and plunge into the refreshing lake—floating, cooling off, recovering. Every time I visit the summer place in Canada I look forward to this ritual. But now it’s near the end of September, summer gone, and the morning temp is cool and the run didn’t make me so hot and...
Last weekend at the Albany Book Festival my table was next to the Adirondack Center for Writing table. It’s an organization that’s building a community of writers and readers in the Adirondacks region, offering classes, workshops, events, and more for writers of all ages. They had one of those old-fashioned gumball machines at their table, this one offering (for a free turn of the handle)...
I’m tabling at the Albany Book Festival when a woman walks by my display and picks up a copy of In Flight. She immediately flips the book to glance at the back cover copy. Two seconds later she puts the book down. She says in a tone that can only be heard as snarky, “Why would I want to read about a man’s midlife crisis?” “It doesn’t say midlife crisis,” I tell her. “It says midlife transitions.”...
Back when I was focusing on hiking all 46 Adirondack high peaks that reached over 4,000 feet, that singular mission kept me focused on the biggest mountains and the most grueling hikes. After checking off about half of the high peaks, I abandoned my quest. I realized there were too many mountains that required more than a single day’s hike to conquer, meaning I would have to carry camping...
Local readers: if you’re searching for compelling, well-plotted novels with engaging, complex characters, you can visit me this Saturday 9/23 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM at the Albany Book Festival sponsored by the New York State Writer’s Institute at SUNY Albany. I’ll be at my display table, where you can hear the author himself talk about, promote, and sell his own books! I like to stage my...
The doorbell rang. It was two chimes—ding-dong—which meant the front door. A single ding is the breezeway door. Twenty-seven years in my house and I can still mix that up. But I can write Pi out to ten decimal places, so I’m cool. A man stands on my front stoop, rocking on the balls of his feet, as if about to launch himself to chase a ball. He holds a book in his hand, half hidden behind his leg...
As a writer of books, I believe in the freedom of all writers to write whatever they want, to express whatever ideas are bubbling in their brains. Consequently, I’m against all book bans, which I consider the equivalent of banning free thought. And yet book challenges and bans have become a primary front in the pathetic culture war being waged in our country. What exactly are book challengers...
About a year ago I wrote “Long Live the Sugar Maple,” about our imperiled tree. This is an update. First, a bit of background: it must have been about twenty years ago that we had the sugar maple planted out front. I’ve always loved the sugar maple’s shape and iconic fall colors and the sweetness of its syrup. It’s the official tree of New York State. I’ve planted plenty of...
We went to see Barbie the other night. There’s a reason the movie is breaking all kinds of revenue and attendance records: it’s highly original, visually compelling, and a lot of fun. Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Ryan Gosling (Ken) deliver outstanding performances. And it had me smiling a lot. In some ways, I’ve never seen a movie like it—the way it depicts Barbie’s perfect, plastic fantasy world...
I’m having an eye exam and the optometrist and I are talking about Bethlehem, the town in upstate New York where we both live. She says she likes Bethlehem but where she lives in a newer development she can’t really walk anywhere. And there aren’t many good restaurants. But most of all what bothers her are the high taxes. She says she just became an empty nester with her second child off to...
Yes, there’s another novel in the works. THE SUITOR is about a recent college grad who falls in love with a charming schemer, leading to her father attempting to prevent the marriage. Sticky situation, right? In this scene, Anna breaks the news of her engagement on a visit to her parents. It doesn’t go according to plan. “How is Kyle?” Deb asked. “I’m sorry he couldn’t make the trip...
My kids are long out of high school (one in grad school, one working within their profession), but their alma mater—Bethlehem High School—has a new policy starting this year: no cell phones. Have you ever once seen a teenager without a phone in their hands? It’s going to be an interesting experiment. Upon arriving at school each day students will need to turn their phones off and lock them in a...
When you’re hiking up one of the high peaks in the Adirondacks (Giant Mountain, 3,000 feet elevation gain), you can’t spend the whole time whining and complaining about the steep pitch, the huge rocks you have to walk over, the hands-and-feet-scrambles, or your sore feet and legs. Because—this hike was a choice you made. You have to spend time talking about other things, and because I was with my...
William Faulkner wrote a southern gothic novel The Light in August that I haven’t read. The title is a reference to a house on fire, but for me the Light in August is a liminal phenomenon. With the light now angled two months past the equinox and casting lanky shadows, the days remain hot. A gap opens in the habits of light and temperature. I sense a difference, the sun steering toward autumn and...
I have a writer friend, Wendy, who has been suffering from the worst kind of writerly affliction: the dreaded writer’s block. She tells me she’s stuck in the quagmire, sinking slowly, grasping at air. Writer’s block is a daunting creative challenge. You can’t find an idea anywhere. You can’t make any progress on your work-in-progress. You have a physical aversion to sitting down at your...
