I'm getting ready to go on a silent retreat next week. It will be a personal retreat at a beautiful center up in Healdsburg, California. Although this is an Advent retreat sponsored by an Episcopalian church that a friend of…

When I first looked at the old film strips of Nazi parades, the people looking at them lovingly, cheering madly, making that same, stiff armed salute, I thought, “What was wrong with them? Were they all dropped on their heads…

It is as if, in the words of Lin Manuel Miranda, the world has turned upside down. It is a true tragic thing that Trump is championed by so many of our fellow countrymen , that he managed to win…

Maybe madness doesn’t stream from every throat—the “every” being too much—but I feel something like a madness that refuses to scream, that is stifled into non-being in my own throat. It cannot be. There is little sense in awakening it,…

After the flood came we really didn’t watch television and wifi in the shelters was so limited that most people kept their phones turned off unless they were trying to reach someone specific, to see who was left of their…

And all through the ink-scrawled pages, crinkling as they turned, baked with age, crusted with crisp energies from long ago, I did not recognize her. Who was that young woman? That tender child? That vulnerable moist mass of naive sensibilities?…

I read your story. I’ll tell you what I like about it first. First, the style itself--brittle, crisp, confident-- is great. It reminds me of Woody Allen. Were you ever a New Yorker? The dialogue has that edge to it.…

The government called people like us, whose homes had been lost to devastating weather changes, “American Survivors”. They lauded us as minor heroes as if, by living somewhere near a tornado zone or a forest fire zone or a flood…

Harry’s apartment is on the second-floor with a view of the trolly tracks and a vacant lot. The trolly’s metal wheels screech like a Banshee seven times a day as it rounds the corner onto Miller street. Harry negotiated a…