Category Archives: Uncategorized

A writing life under the metaphorical gun. I was sitting in the backseat of the car taking me from the airport in Lexington, Kentucky to the college at which I was scheduled to speak that afternoon. My laptop—for once true to its name—was resting on my lap as I cut, pasted, and typed my way […]

An address at Transylvania University, 10.18.18 Good afternoon. I’d like to thank President Carey and the university for inviting me to speak to you today as part of the Creative Intelligence program. I appreciate the warm welcome, and I would especially like to thank each of you for coming to listen. This afternoon I’ll be […]

Reading and remembering in a Soviet prison camp. The most interesting book I’ve read recently is only about sixty pages long, even though it is about a book fifty times longer than that. It is, in fact, not about reading that longer book, but about remembering it; which couldn’t be more appropriate, given that the […]

In the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. For someone who has lived so long on the page, traveling in books, as opposed to real life, is not as impoverished an experience as it might seem on the face of it. Not when there is writing like this to savor: The sun had gone down but […]

A sojourn in Gascony, a suspension of Spain. We’d planned a trip for this September. It was to be an encore of sorts of our trip to Gascony in May 2018, when we spent a week under the influence of Kate Hill, an American expatriate and cultural and culinary educator who has lived in France […]

Welcome to the Battle of the Books. On Tuesday evening, July 21, we held a virtual Battle of the Books in collaboration with the Plainview-Old Bethpage Public Library. This was the third virtual Battle we’ve done, and I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the way online channels—we’ve used both Zoom and Crowdcast—prove congenial to […]

Rhymes on my grandmother’s 100th birthday. Time came with you on the immigrant ship The wished-for century of luck and hope You carried within you the length of the trip A resilient, intricately coiled rope Whose strength has served you for a hundred years. Just like you, grandmother, to take the trope We use to […]

The writer who made me want to write. Upstairs in my parents’ house, in a room off what was, in our teenaged years, my sister’s bedroom, are the remains of the library I assembled through my first twenty-odd years. The rows of spines on the two walls covered with shelves are riddled with gaps, representing […]

Late at night with my mother’s favorite books. I sit in my parents’ living room in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s dark except for the illumination provided by the large television that is my father’s constant companion as he dozes and wakes in his reclining lift chair, ruminating, I can only suppose, […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. Tall trees surround our house, spaced across the hilly lawn like stately privacies. Their sleek, strong trunks reach beyond the roof before they ramify into clusters of branch and leaf—earthbound, rooted clouds that nonetheless depend upon the sky. To sit beneath them and look up, as I did […]