Whatever aspects of parenting my mother may have found challenging, fan club president was a role she really warmed up to. From the way she and my father acted, I grew up thinking I was Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson rolled into one, and my younger sister grew up thinking she was the younger sister […]
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Posted inMedia
Baltimore Fishbowl wins 21 MDDC awards, including Best of Show for ‘Website of General Excellence’
Baltimore Fishbowl won a total of 21 awards — including Best of Show for “Website of General Excellence — in the Maryland, Delaware, District of Columbia Press Association Contest this week for works published in 2022.
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Eat a Peach
Sparing you from this month’s various ridiculous episodes — a bad experience buying an iPhone, anecdotes that would embarrass my dog or irritate my kids — I decided to try another glose, this one about aging. The glose is the poetic form where you quote four lines from another poet’s work, and those become the […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
November at the Beach, with Drag Queens
My dog Wally and I were at the beach for the first two weeks of November. I stayed in the same little condo I have been renting for many years now, on Dewey Beach in Delaware. This late in the year, the beach itself was largely deserted and most of the shops on the strip […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
The Writing Teacher, The Drama Teacher, His Wife, and Their Babysitter
In the summer of 2018, I taught a week-long workshop for The Writer’s Hotel, a conference in New York. My group of creative nonfiction students each brought the first 5,000 words of a completed memoir manuscript to the group for feedback. One of those students, Kate Nason, was an elegant woman about my age with […]
Posted inFeatured
Baltimore Fishbowl wins 11 MDDC Press Association awards, including ‘Best of Show’ nod
Baltimore Fishbowl won 11 awards – including a “Best of Show” recognition – in the Maryland, Delaware, District of Columbia Press Association Contest this week for stories published in 2021.
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Nana Has News
Look who showed up in Boston last month! My grandson. Believe it or not, his other abuelita, Maria Rosa, beat me to writing the first poem about him, in Spanish. Already he is an internationally celebrated child.
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Behind the Scenes at the Book Review Factory
One Saturday morning my son called from Boston. We chatted briefly about this and that, and when we ran out of things to say, he asked, “So whatcha got goin’ today?” “Just working,” I said. “You?” “Working.” I’m pretty sure if we had conferenced in my sister the CPA and his brother the musician, they […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
A Trip to Texas
This past month I spent ten days in Austin, checking out my son Vince’s cute new house and celebrating his 31st birthday with a pool party and a really great dinner at Uchiko. Vince was born in Austin — at home, in our bed, with a midwife, which I can never stop bragging about — […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
The Cicadas and the Sun
Editor’s note: This column won second place (Division O) in the Local Column: Feature or Humor category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2021 Contest. Read our other award-winning pieces here. At first I could not understand why everyone was so excited about the cicadas. They’re coming, they’re coming, wait for it, they’re coming […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
A Valentine’s Day Flash from the Past
The world has changed a lot in the past couple decades, as you’ve surely noticed, and especially since about 2015, with #metoo and Black Lives Matter and the introduction of “they” as a singular pronoun and so much more. If you watch a television show or movie from the nineties or aughts, it’s almost unbelievable […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Martha, Martha, Martha
My friend Martha Thomas died last week at 60 after a short, vicious experience with cancer. A seizure in January led to the diagnosis of a glioblastoma tumor in a part of her brain that would not permit surgery and made treatment unlikely to have results. She was living in Easton, Maryland, and at the […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Cooking for One
So far my high hopes for 2021 seem like major magical thinking, though I guess there is still a lot of year left. I only wish I felt like the captain of my destiny. I wish I could let go of everything that sucked about last year and start fresh in a completely different place. […]
Posted inBohemian Rhapsody
Notes from the End of the Year
Oh, how I miss my old friend Beau, who came to us with a bell on his collar one Christmas early in the century, but anyone who has a puppy will know the difficulty of finding time to be sad, which was surely the point of the puppy.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
The Zoom Box of Dorian Gray
Trigger warning: If you don’t want to hear a very lucky and privileged person who should be making gratitude lists or at the very least doing something more useful than bitching about their pandemic experience bitch about their pandemic experience, you are advised to stop reading now. Let us begin by recalling the story of […]
