Without music, life would be an error. — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Music (and other) geeks tend to make “best of” lists, sometimes every year. A few years back, I was asked by a now-defunct publication…
Posts published in “Essays”
(AVA June, 1996.) In-Service Training by Richard Carlson The legislature determined that we needed uplifting and sensitizing, so five or six days a year — the dreaded SIP days (Student Improvement Program) — we went to…
Now We Are Six When I was one, I had just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not…
A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in a letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Obama and his top legal…
It’s June and I can see trees falling on the steep slope south of the Albion River, part of a Mendocino Redwood Co. timber harvest. Fir and redwood crash to the ground in McKay Gulch…
I am currently in the throes of rewriting a novel I first completed in 2003, rewrote entirely in 2006, and then did not touch for six years. I have only undertaken this kind of extended…
The way her tongue clicked as she switched from French to Arabic, her mother listening via Skype from thousands of miles away in Lebanon; it all was such magic. Her black boots were pushed in…