Guestwords

The Star has published my fiction. I’ve contributed reviews, many “Guestwords,” and most recently poems. A peculiarity of my condition is that I have never after all these years met one person at the paper I write for.

We hold these (new) truths to be self-evident . . .

Camp Siegfried in Yaphank was one two dozen Nazi youth camps that spread like a plague across the United States of America in the 1930s. 

It was enough to make me start smoking again.

A granddaughter’s reading of a poem sparks memories of Lawrence Koncelik of Northwest Woods, veteran, scholar, teacher, sailing instructor.

A retailer’s lament: When that woman on the Main Street bench is not who you expect.

Joy is how we survive, and Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” was one place to find it.

From Kent State to Minneapolis.

What is it about acquiring the deed to a house that makes a lifetime desk-job guy become a Bob the Builder wannabe?

Looking for what’s real beneath the sensationalism of the Fabulous Hamptons.

This is a good time to talk about rejection in all its forms, social, romantic, academic, and work.

The push for academic success produces far too much distress in high school students. Here are a few ideas for reducing it.

Here is a simple solution to solving the affordable housing problem in East Hampton while preventing our businesses from dying.

Does anyone need 20 kinds of deodorant?

Adventures crewing with Capt. Carl Forsberg on the Viking Fleet and in the Wild West of Old Montauk.

Much of what I learned from running the first and only all-vegan place in the Hamptons came through failure. But it wasn’t a total loss.

My maternal grandmother was critical and not affectionate in the least. In fact, I was afraid of her. But now that I’m a grandmother myself, I see there’s more to the story.

What we are witnessing in the waterfowl die-offs here is not an isolated incident. It is part of a much larger ecological process unfolding across continents.

Maybe it’s time to show deer some mercy.

Lessons in humanity from the Blackout of 2003.

Freud equated understanding the mind with an archeological dig. The sites are sometimes real places.

The patron saint of Sag Harbor’s 1970s turnaround.

The idea of a men’s book club, but for films, ticked a lot of boxes: manageable time commitment for a perfectly masculine activity in which plot structure and technique were front and center. Thus was born the GODAWFUL Film Society.

My crash course introduction to my mother’s imaginary world began with a home visit to plan her surprise 90th birthday party.

Memorializing the former Swamp disco and Annex restaurant site on a 1.1-acre highway parcel in Wainscott is a misguided idea.

America’s most intense crucible was, of course, the Civil War. Now we have been plunged into another period of national testing, and it is by no means certain that our political system will survive.

I have found that the biggest challenge of all is to make sense of what it means to find myself in the midst of middle-old age.

When we hear governments complain about violations of sovereignty, we must ask whose sovereignty is really being defended — and whose interests.

Saying goodbye to the painter Connie Fox, who died in East Hampton in 2023.

A Christmas prayer for when our feelings of joy are mixed with grief and loss.