I CAN STILL SMELL IT

They had moved three times, from their original apartment in Gramercy Park, to the East Side on 72nd and finally to the big high rise on the West Side overlooking the Hudson. “I can still smell it,” Rachel said. “It’s not possible. It’s been four years.” Larry, because he loved her with the same zeal […]

Lying About My Age: A Reflection on Ageism

I am seriously thinking about lying about my age. Of course it’s impossible. The internet has my age engraved in perpetuity. I notice the difference immediately after my most casual face-to-face social revelation of the “number” – even if it is merely a reminder to my friends and my children. The change in expression is […]

The Creative Writing Course That Changed My Life

In 1949 when I was twenty-one years old I took a creative writing course at the New School in Manhattan given by Professor Don M. Wolfe. He had been my freshman English teacher at New York University, where I graduated in 1947, just two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I lived at home in […]

How Do You Confront Bad Book Reviews?

Every serious novelist worth their salt believes in their soul that they have written a brilliant novel or multiple novels in which the reader will find compelling characters engaged in deeply imagined stories that profoundly illustrate the human condition. What every novelist, traditionally or self-published, yearns for is for others to be moved by their […]

Memory is My Greatest Ally in Fiction Writing

I have been asked repeatedly how one can avoid the memory blocks that so often plague older people. As a novelist in my 87th year, I can attest that memory is the key to writing. Everything that happens in the life of a human being is stored somewhere in the brain, intact and perhaps as […]

Should We Be Shrinking Fiction in America’s Common Core Reading Lists?

As a novelist I never realized how much skin in the game I had in terms of the Common Core curriculum. Only recently did I discover that fiction, according to common core, is being shrunk in favor of non-fiction. After reading a telling New York Times article that gives an in-depth overview of how non-fiction is coming […]