I gave up cigarettes when I was twenty-eight. Then I let the coffee drop. Strong Lipton tea? Yeah, that was bad. Now it’s down to green tea, white tea, and Kukicha twig. It sounds like I’m an old elk in deep winter, longing to chew bark! Actually–this is funny to me–while in college, I used…

With the hot movie about Truman Capote still in the theaters, everybody’s rereading Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the true story of two men with closeted sexual issues who brutally murder a wholesome Kansas family of four. I say, “There is another way to understand this remarkable author!” You’ll find a deeper, sweeter, still-alienated Capote in…

It is hard to look outside at the brilliant yellow leaves and not think of one of the world’s greatest appreciators of the eternally changing seasons: a Seattle writer named Waverly Fitzgerald. If you don’t know her work and her website “The School of the Seasons,” I am thrilled to be introducing you. “Each season…

This past summer, while browsing in a bookstore, I happened upon a slim volume devoted to the landscape paintings of a still-living Massachusetts artist named Mary Sipp-Green. If I were a painter, I would want to paint like her. I thought you would be similarly moved by these paintings. They have an ethereal quality that…

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