Life is in the editing room, where we are making a documentary about a shark woman, Meghan, teaching her 4 volunteers how to do shark research. They have 4 big fishing reels, on which they’ve put sizeable cubes of salmon.…

(I'm continuing to work on revising my novel here. This is from roughly the middle of this character's arc.) It was freezing inside the restaurant, like the more air conditioning you had the more you could charge for a steak.…

I’ve spent at least 80 days on the road over the last two years: work trips, family adventures, elder care, writing retreats. And the strongest realization I’ve conjured after all that travel is that my life is not elsewhere; it…

“………ain’t never what a girl supposes….”, chirps the soubrette Ellie in Jerome Kerns hit operetta SHOW BOAT, backed by a similarly chirping chorus of towns women who think being an actress is filled with glamor and stage door Johnnies who…

A dream. Students roam the dim, crowded hallways of George Washington High School. I wear the wispy rags of Annabel Lee. Students are in costume too: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, a Ghost, several withches, a bee, a robot, a mummy, a…

My heart lives outside my body somewhere, but where exactly are you hiding, my heart? & what are you hiding? I'm hiding somewhere in the Bay Area, in the East Bay, in a house in the Berkeley Hills &, by…

I met her in the waiting room of the blood center I went to this morning to have a blood panel drawn…we are keeping an eye on my potassium levels…and her name was Ruth. I talk freely to strangers in…

I had never even ridden a horse, couldn't have identified one breed from the other or known what cutting meant when it concerned a horse. On a cattle ranch, there are many situations in which you need to separate diffreent…

The sort of world we've gotten used to living in is violent, turbulent at its core. Continents split off from each other, or subduct under each other & we experience this as an earthquake. Red fiery lava flows from volcanic…

The heart is a complex machine, made of so many mysterious moving parts, human medicine still has not discovered every one of them yet….those puzzling parts of a game that are vital to the running of the machine, but hidden…

[Context: First half of a personal essay related to my upcoming debut novel for possible pre-publication promotion.] In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked how he could tell something could be called obscenity. He famously replied, “I know…

I was at my friend Mark’s house the other day. When I arrived, he was on speaker phone, with a friend of his who lives in Gaza. I sat down across from him at the dining room table. His daughter…