In 1988 I spent one summer in Iowa City, the home of University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, submitting a portfolio of essays and hoping...

Shedding almost all one's earthly possessions is said to be very therapeutic, but at what point is it just a mechanism for running away?...

My last entry was a year and four months ago. I've read Joad Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, where she recounts the days of the...

In The Waste Land, TS Eliot’s poem opens with, “April is the cruelest month…” but somehow December seemed crueler this year. November...

November is a month filled with friends, family, and a promise of plenty around a Thanksgiving table. From the first Thanksgiving in 1612...

It is December 18th, 2020 and two days before my 73rd birthday. I am at the Ackerman Cancer Center and the small room feels cold as Dr....

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is...

Getting a jump on Women's Equality Day, August 26, 2022, I pondered the progress of celebrating women in literature. Amanda Gorman has...

A long and varied history of positive interactions with monkeys. We were living just outside of Chicago, in Winnetka at the time. My...

A large sea turtle washed up on the beach today. His thick shell is still green and moist, sloping down to mossy scalloped edges. The...

Since 1986 I had often visited my parents here on Amelia Island, but I only became a resident in September of 2015. It was time to...

or The Golfers and the Geese My first encounter with the migrating water birds was in 1981 in Salisbury, Connecticut. In the northeastern...

Rome was built on seven hills and St. Stephen’s International School, where I taught for seven years, was built on the Aventine Hill....

During the years I was teaching in Athens, I would fly back to Amelia Island to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my mother. In 1994...

I inherited a genetic strand of pearls; a family heirloom handed down by some evolutionary lottery from my parents, both of whom had all...

Moving from Simsbury, Connecticut to Uruguay in 2011 offered an opportunity to experience a new continent and new culture. Montevideo is...

The Golf rattled along from Khalkidhiki through Thessaloniki toward Macedonia. Scant months before my seniors had been released from...

The Roman Skyline from the Genicolo We have been binge-re-watching The Sopranos and I feel like the violence and chaos on the daily news...

When we visited Washington, D.C. over the Spring break, there was another monument I added to the usual parade through history: The...