My Blog
Paperback Release Update
An update on the deluxe paperback edition of My City of Dreams: We’ve had some challenges. The high-quality paper TidePool Press prefers became scarce in 2021, causing delays. Then there was a fire at the plant that makes the covers. Then the computer systems at the...
2022 Jack & Anita Hess Seminar
[Photo Caption: Jewish nurses and nursing students gather around a cart outside a coffee house on the designated Judenstrasse during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, ca. 1940-1942 - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Clara Renee Karen Vromen]...
The Isolation Room
In 2007-2010 I made three service trips to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the subject of an essay titled And the Lame Shall Walk published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. I’d finished the first draft of My City of Dreams and was trying to write something new. I...
Outtakes
I had a wonderful virtual reading in my hometown of Syracuse, NY through Temple Concord on March 22. It was great to see so many old friends and new readers. I read the first paragraph from one of the old “beginnings” of my memoir, back when it started with merged...
Ethical Musings
At the end of My City of Dreams, I had many ideas that I wanted to put on the page as "themes" or "lessons". Much of this was removed from the final version of the book. With my upcoming event through the bioethics departments of Harvard Medical School and Colorado...
Eulogy
[Image taken from the deck of The Queen of Surrey] I’m recuperating from a sledding accident and trying to catch up with things from bed. The pandemic is making me think a lot about people I’ve lost over the years. It’s approaching the 3rd anniversary of the memorial...