“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
In my magpie way of reading now, 3 or 4 books going at once including recorded titles that tell me stories or lodge history into my mind through a voice – then always a book of poetry, books about the Revolutionary War, 1942, the Bronx in 1977, then a friend’s novel, articles from The Atlantic, the Times, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and just before […]
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I took nine months off when I retired from teaching. Then I started working again. I’ve held a job for 59 consecutive years. This is the complete list in chronological order: Snow shoveler; busboy at 14 at a restaurant where the husband and wife co-owners were both alcoholics and often screamed at each other directly above the main dining room where Sunday lunch was being served; produce boy and bagger […]
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I taught writing for 36 years. I was taught how to write by 3 or 4 very good teachers including colleagues. I learned most about it by teaching it. I cannot imagine my life without writing. I worry, as only a teacher can worry, that the ability to write will slip away from kids as they rely more and more on AI and ChatGPT to do their thinking for them. […]
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Taught to read at a very young age, raised in a house with few books but encouraged to haunt libraries, entranced by the images I could make in my head based on strings of words I heard or read, I took to books as birds take to the air – the element that set me partially free of adult controls and made me imaginatively migratory. I worry that my experience […]
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