Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water...
I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found compelling. It’s simply an opportunity for me to point out excellent...
It’s never too late to go back to school to learn something new, and with that in mind I enrolled in the UC Berkeley course “Wealth and Poverty” taught by the economist Robert Reich. The course consisted of fourteen lectures, recorded in a classroom at Berkeley in 2023, and is now free to the public. Reich in action teaching his class. Reich worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford...
Where the sky and sea and shore converge upon a single color: silver–how inspired a child would be to write a poem, but no word in the world rhymes with silver, so go with silverish or even silvery: a view so brilliantly silvery we are compelled to gaze upon its mystery–it’s not visual trickery but rather nature’s cast spell of subtle bewitchery.Pacific Ocean South of San Francisco
The police stopped by my house today. I happened to be looking out the window when the unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway. I say unmarked because the car didn’t have the aggressive black and white badging of Bethlehem’s patrol cars, although the matte-black Challenger with the extra antenna and “hidden” lights on the grill and inside the windshield is obviously a law enforcement vehicle. Two...
One thing I love about going to a bookstore such as City Lights in San Francisco—that original haven of the Beat Generation writers—is that I’m sure to walk out of there with a novel I’m not going to find at other, more mainstream bookstores. In this case, I bought the 2001 novel Platform by Michel Houellebecq, who I’ve never read and who is considered France’s most celebrated and controversial...
After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.” I...
Despite feeling lethargic and unmotivated at the tail end of having Covid (again!), I made my way to downtown Albany because today was 50501—50 protests at 50 state capitals all on 1 day. Living right near a state capital, I felt compelled to show up. It’s been a difficult few months since the election, and an even tougher couple of weeks since the inauguration. Our country has been divided into...
It’s a thrill to discover an artist, writer, or musician for the first time. Yayoi Kusama is a 95-year-old Japanese artist whose installations I experienced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Throughout a career lasting decades, she has harbored a fascination with polka dots and pumpkins. I can see why those shapes inspire a visual artist. This mirror room with polka dots creates...
One of the most iconic car chase scenes in movie history takes place in the 1968 film Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen as Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt. McQueen drives a Mustang GT pursued by a Dodge Charger during a riveting car chase through the hilly, treacherous streets of San Francisco. The streets are so steep that the cars whizzing downhill launch into the air and...
I have this pillow, it has a name: Lumpy, a name Owen came up with some years ago when he used Lumpy as his bed pillow. Folklore has it that Lumpy was my pillow from childhood, and I think I remember this—tucking into bed at night with a heavy pillow that was in parts too crammed with feathers and in other parts lacking, so that my head rested on uneven, contoured terrain, in places soft, in...
It’s May, I’m in sixth grade, I’m on the sidewalk in front of my house on Amherst Street back when we still lived on the busy street. The bridal veil bushes are covered in clusters of white blooms and my parents are sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee in the evening after dinner. I’m throwing a tennis ball against the wooden porch stairs and it bounces back to me. I catch the grounder in...
The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the hot, urgent Santa Ana foehn winds fueled devastating fires in the Los Angeles area. But this most recent episode might be the most horrific of all, arriving on the tail of an extremely dry season and following the hottest year ever on record. This isn’t a forest fire burning acres of trees in a remote area; this one is burning houses...
A while ago I wrote lyrics for a friend of mine who’s a singer-songwriter and I’m back at it. The timing is right because I’ve become interested in the most rudimentary element of poetry and lyrics: rhyming schemes. I’ve been spending way too much time playing with language and experimenting with rhyming patterns and how they shape–and are shaped by–theme and...
Dear Mary: I’ve decided to finally respond to your emails not because I remember you, but because I don’t. When you first contacted me after my name and face appeared in the media following the plane crash, I had no recall of you. After you sent a second email with your photo attached posing in front of Agora in Grant Park—a photo you claimed I took—I still had no recollection of you. I assumed...
I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form of book censorship. But that’s just my...
We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more mindful and grateful, helping others, spending more time with family, etc. A few of us wanted...
We all read listicles—”The Top Ten This” and “The Eight Ways to Do That.” It’s a popular format in this era of short attention spans. But I have a tip for readers to make listicles even faster and easier to read: skip all the introductory text (such as this paragraph) and go right to the list. There’s rarely any useful information in the introduction. Or you...
I’ve recently paid attention to the sonnet form of poetry, and even wrote a modest entry of my own. Now I’ve been studying the villanelle. Like a sonnet, a villanelle follows a defined structural form, and therein lies my interest, which is why I’ve been drawn to Pecha Kucha. As a novelist, I have a lot of creative license with form: you can do anything you want, as long as you keep the reader...
