A few years ago I was doing the unimaginable: dealing in person, unmasked and in real time, with a teller in the small bank in the village close to where I live. The bank's manager, who kindly keeps abreast of my work via my newsletters and such, came out of her office to say...

Update: April. 24th 2021 Well, no sense asking you to ‘stay tuned’. Sometimes, as I’ve had to work up another proviso to put here instead of school registration info, I’ve felt like an MC who’s being prompted from the wings to ‘vamp until ready’, until the tech snafus are undone and the show can go...

I don't know what happens to a culture when its performers and artists are dropped from the invitation list. Totalitarian regimes have kept a pretty tight rein on them, brought them into line, turned them into shills for what prevailed. Other kinds of regimes have turned them into decorations, sidelines, cartoons. Artists, not lawyers,...

You could call it your life. You could. Life's not answering to that, though. Life's not even listening. I've written a few books, but I'm no writer. Writers as I imagine them probably gather a life together that serves the writing, or tolerates it. Or they go without one, so they can write. That's not...

War is hell, the trustworthy adage goes. Most people who've been don't talk about it much. Most of our language can't do it justice. That says more about our language than it does about war, maybe. These days are something like war, I'm guessing. No enemy of the usual kind hunts us down, no matter...