“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”—Oscar Wilde One of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes identifies a writer as someone who has trained his or her mind to misbehave. I chose it as the representative quotation in the ‘Who Says?’ column on my blog last week, and I’ve left it up… Continue Reading
“Eat fast,” my bunkmate said. “We have to be at Shop soon.” “If you need supplies, you have all day,” I informed her; trying hard to show I’d acclimated to the camp schedule. “The shop doesn’t close until just before dinner.” “Not the shop where you buy stuff, Dummy! ‘Shop…where you do woodwork,” she said… Continue Reading
A group of seven seemingly disparate people came together recently to begin a creative workshop experience unlike any other; at least, none they’d come in contact with before. The idea germinated in a lecture given on a Mozart concerto at the Julliard School. I had the good fortune of stumbling on it at the invitation… Continue Reading
Years ago, I might have said ‘once upon a time’ it seems so foreign now, a real estate office I worked in kept its supply of current newspapers stacked in the copy room. Mailboxes lined one wall and a fax machine graced the facing counter. The huge Xerox behemoth that ran our lives took up… Continue Reading
My sister had a nerve-wracking habit of appearing in my room uninvited. The fact that I would have been drawn and quartered, probably literally, if I’d dared to consider the privacy of her room assailable had no bearing on the sanctity of my space. She was privileged; I was pathetic–from her point of view, anyway.… Continue Reading
A recent Opinionator article by Peter Orner in the NY Times, titled “Writing About What Haunts Us”, stuck a commemorative thorn in my side. His piece addresses guilt as a motivation for writing fiction in general, and a particular incident in his young life that haunted him so deeply he had to turn to non-fiction… Continue Reading