Smoke and Mirrors

or “my life up in smoke,” or “ashes to ashes,” or “no butts about it” … my latest published essay is about cigarettes I have smoked, from first to last and beyond.

“Smoke and Mirrors” appears in the Summer issue of The Chaos – read it here.

 

“Que sera, sera”

If you don’t remember that song–what can I say–you’re young. Good for you. And the rest of us can sing along with Doris Day.

The incident in my essay “Whatever Will Be” was buried until a random writing prompt unearthed it: “Call up an unfamiliar memory … examine it as if for the first time … see what’s hidden….” And there it was, as if waiting to be summoned from the deep. I intentionally didn’t ask my brother to fact-check it, as I often do when writing about our childhood, because I wanted it to be my own recollections and reflections. Now, however, David replies with amazement, says he too had forgotten.

“Whatever Will Be” appears now in the summer issue of The Citron Review, a lovely, lemony journal that I’ve long admired. Click here to read.

This one’s for you, Bro….

 

A tale/tail of lobster and love

My daughter’s fondness for lobster didn’t come from me, but it’s in the family. I readily recall my mother relishing every morsel as she dabbed at the butter dripping down her chin. I wrote about their shared passion as a quirky, perhaps unique recessive trait, like red hair and twins, in “Lobster Tales,” which was published this summer in  Oasis Journal 2016. The almost-500-page annual is available in print from Amazon, but you can read my contribution here.

 

Drunks and Fools

I’ve known a number of drunks & a lot of fools (most of us qualify at one time or another). I’ve always thought there was wisdom in the pairing of the two, although I don’t believe they’re under divine protection.

When I decided to write about booze in my life, the title was a given.

Here’s “Drunks and Fools,” freshly published in bioStories.

 

Dead Housekeeping

That’s the provocative name of an onsite literary journal that sees its purpose to be “a heartfelt look at loss through the lens of the home.” More as a writing exercise than anything else, I tackled the challenge of creating a micro-essay that would capture a small portion of my mother’s idiosyncratic ways.

Voila! Linked here is “Fresh Linens,” the latest post at Dead Housekeeping. I didn’t have a photo of my mom in action, so I had to perform the re-enactment.

 

Contemplations of a Wandering Jew

My latest published essay, “Alef, Bet, Gimel: Contemplations of a Wandering Jew” begins: “Being Jewish is my legacy, but what does that mean?” In this exploratory work I dig around in my roots to puzzle out what for me is an elusive identity yet one that I cling to.

I’m happy to have this work published in the 33rd issue of Hamilton Stone Review. Read it here in the nonfiction section.

 

“She grieved because she could not grieve”

That line from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the first of a number of quotations that I use to augment my essay, “My Quarrel with Grieving,” which was published in the Winter 2015 issue of Permafrost. Here’s the link.

This is my take on a difficult topic. Ruminating, researching and writing this piece turned out to be it’s own reward in that I solidified some of my thinking during the process. Still, it was gratifying to see it published in the 37th volume of the farthest north literary journal in the U.S.

Lest you think I’m slighting my number one source of quotes and inspiration, Virginia Woolf–no stranger to grief–is an integral part.