So we travelled this past week to celebrate Thanksgiving with family. I hope you had the chance to do the same and, if you couldn’t, I hope you enjoyed the heck out of being able to eat a meal on your own schedule and watch whatever you wanted on tel...

I’ve been at this writing business quite a while, stretching back to typewriters, carbon copies, and self-addressed stamped envelopes for the return of manuscripts. I subscribed to about a dozen literary journals, and spent every evening reading, or...

I’m fully into the leaf-gathering phase of the year. I wish it were a harvest, meaning that the leaves had some value as food, or could be processed into a fibrous wonder material like hemp, or, best of all, transmogrified into gold. Alas, they are t...

I became obsessed with magic tricks when I was ten years old. This was back in 1974 and the only magicians I’d seen at that point were cartoon versions in Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons, and their ilk. It’s not like my parents took us to vaudeville sh...

The past few weeks I’ve been dealing with our apple crop. You wouldn’t think a humble house in the suburbs would also be a burgeoning apple orchard, but my wife has vision. “I’ll just plant a few trees,” she said. At first, I was only annoyed because...

My day was blown up right after work when I noticed a guy struggling to start his pickup truck. I had just finished my day job and was plotting my evening: write this newsletter, write my novel, play with the dogs, and exercise. I’d have time later o...

Back in high school there was a minor bully I’ll call John. He was really more of a toady, hanging around some of the tough kids. Or maybe he was more of a sidekick, like Garth was to Wayne, Barney was to Fred, or Sancho Panza was to Don Quixote. Reg...

This week, my mother would have turned 95. She’s been gone a while, but I think of her often, and how she schemed and fought for what she believed was right. She didn’t win all of her battles—it’s tough when the deck is stacked against you—but she wo...

I found a dead opossum in the yard this morning. It was a youngster and I’m saddened, as my dog may have had a paw in its death. Opossum are occasional visitors to our yard and the dogs go berserk but hadn’t harmed one before. Typically, the opossum...

The first person who suggested I might become a writer was my eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Recht (pronounced wrecked). The irony was that she wasn’t trying to encourage me; she was humiliating another student. She’d given us a book report assig...