OF THE MORE THAN one dozen books I have researched and written, the project that made the biggest impact on me, personally, took place over a six-year period beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I immersed myself in the world’s largest organ tran

A FRIEND OF THE WRITER Kim Stolz once jumped onto subway tracks to retrieve a dropped iPhone. Telling the story in Unfriending My Ex and Other Things I’ll Never Do, Stolz reports being horrified by the risk—yet adds, “If this same friend dropped her

SOME YEARS AGO, in a workshop, I wrote about my sister’s self-destructive adolescence. I recounted her recklessness with boys and alcohol, the anger that erupted like a geyser inside her, and her hell-bent desire to run away—which she did by joining

TO MAKE HISTORY, gather together a poet and his lover and her stepsister, another poet and his doctor. Send them to the mountains in summertime but have the weather betray them, turn cold and wet, keep them inside near a roaring fire. Provide a book

TO BEGIN IS to admit an infatuation, a longing, a love. A beginning signals that one has moved well past being merely interested and is now immersed in what is most likely an obsession. To begin connotes more than falling in love: to begin is to comm

I was ten when my dad changed his name from Rich to Rick. That one little letter was the first quiver of a seismic shift. Fluctuation deviation transformation supervening in the silent spaces in between while we waited in our places around that dinin

neesers7 Today I fold three sympathy cards into their envelopes. If only sorrow could be tucked away so easily. 26 Oct 17 sevans_writer I soak up the quiet of the house before everyone awakes. When I finally hear tiny footsteps upstairs, I feel not j