Wow. What a great year for movies. For the past couple of weeks, I've been squeezing in many of the Fall Oscar-run releases, and I've been deliberating over my list of the year with the nagging feeling that I'm forgetting...
I read fifty-six books in 2013, a good number for me and
really, sort of hard to believe because it certainly doesn’t feel like I
average a book a week. For sure, lots of these were read in batches, during a
vacation or at times...
The last three times I went out running, my iPod has served
up “Sweet Home Alabama” as part of its shuffle. There’s no rhyme or reason to
this, only sheer mathematics, which is certainly no specialty of mine. So...
The Flat is a documentary from 2012. The filmmaker, Arnon
Goldfinger, along with the rest of his family, enters his grandparents’ flat in
Tel Aviv with the aim of clearing it out after his grandmother’s death at the
age of...
When I graduated from high school, my grandmother gave me a
set of china. Plates, smaller plates, serving dishes, sugar and creamer set, gravy boat—the
whole kit and caboodle. They’d been having a promotion at her grocery...
At a dance show last weekend, one of the pieces listed a few
outside sources as inspiration. One was a story about Marcel Proust and a
friend, who had quarreled over life and art: specifically, about whether an
artist should...
I’ve been sequestered in my house for the past couple of
months, determined to finish a collection of stories I’ve been working on for,
well, probably a couple of years now. Or more. Who knows. I’ve been writing
them off...
November is National Novel Writing Month or, for those in
the know, NaNoWriMo. The month-long challenge that began in 1999 with 21 novelists
has evolved to a much larger production; lots and lots of writers log in and attempt
to...
I was
feeling badly about feeling badly about this time of year. Specifically:
Autumn, and even more specifically, what has become the month-long build-up to
everyone’s second favorite holiday, Halloween. Because I’ve never...
“I don’t strike out much. I write on... I do one draft. I do
the editing in my head first. I very seldom change paragraphs and things
around. I’ve heard that it’s very useful for people who do move things about to
have...
There’s a song being played on the “Hits” pop station I’m
forced to listen to when my kids are along for the ride (almost always). It’s called “American
Girl” and it’s sung by Bonnie McKee. The opening lyrics include...
"I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the
morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon
I put it back again.” ...
After Betty Gardiner dies, she
leaves behind her country house for her family. Nowell, her grandson, first
moves in then soon after his wife, Vivian. The day Vivian moves in, a teen girl
dies in their backyard and...
I've been working on a story collection for a while. It began as a few vivid scenes I wanted to work out and grew, as scenes sometimes do, into something larger that included more and more people. I began to think about...
Recently, I found a story I wrote some time ago. It’s a
sketch really, an idea barely fleshed out, something to pass the time.
A young women finds herself the contestant on a television dating show, a
premise which...
"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka
