My Writing

The Life Literary not only is bag full of ideas for ways a person can add words to life.  It’s also where I collect what I’m writing.  Besides the ideas, I’m working on several projects.  I’m hoping to publish these collections of essays and stories.  For now, I’m writing and compiling them on this blog.

The Life Literary – I’m compiling ideas for how anybody can add words to daily living.   Words enrich life.  I’d like to think a regular diet of excellent, sometimes funny, sometimes profound, sometimes poetic, hopefully always well-written words, even a few at a time, might make a difference in this word-wallowing world.

Jerusalem Letters – My work (and my wife’s) took us to Jerusalem where we lived for three years from 2004 to 2007.  My first couple years there I wrote emails, essays really, to family and friends about life in Jerusalem.  I wrote about social and cultural events, things I saw and did, descriptions of visits to historical places.  I really tried to capture the feeling of whatever I was talking about at the time, my reactions and observations of how other people responded to and lived  in this amazing, complex place.

Bombay Letters – My work took me and my family, my wife and three children, to Bombay, India where we lived for two years, 1998 and 1999.  This was my first assignment with my new employer and I was flush with the excitement and adventure of being able to live and work in such an exotic, wondrous place.  I poured that excitement into many letters to family and friends back home.

Whitecaps on the Potomac – Perspectives, thoughts, doings during five years in Washington, a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of place to be, except that our “teapot” is the river.

From the Bride’s Father’s Notebook – I have essentially completed a collection of essays I wrote when our daughter got married at the end of 2009.  At the time, I wanted to set on paper an account of our daughter’s wedding, not simply or even mostly a description of the events, but rather a sounding of the depth of our feelings, our reactions to it all.

Garden: A Love Story – My garden experiences in Smith, Jones, and the Lorelei form the basis of Garden: A Love Story, that journal I first imagined after gardening in Seoul.  Planted between these entries are reminiscences, snapshots and vignettes from the gardens of my life, from those first experiments (all gardening is an experiment) when I was fifteen to the many garden loves of my life.

The Rider Chronicles – Occasional stories and essays about our new grandson and life as a grandfather.

Among the Liberators: A Walk Down Virginia Avenue – Welcomed by poets, accompanied by statesmen and generals (the Liberators), walking mostly under the shade of lofty elms and oaks, the open-eyed pedestrian strolling down  the avenue will be inspired, delighted and refreshed.  That’s why I’m writing a travelogue about this 1.1 mile gem of a street  in the northwest part of Washington, D.C. called Virginia Avenue.

The Life and Times of Union Center – I am experimenting with a series of stories where the plants, flowers, bushes, and trees, that grow within a two block radius of where I work in Washington, D.C. are the main characters.  Pull up a chair and get to know this special place.  The riders and the shakers, the ups and downs, the celebrations and tragedies unique to here are also, somehow, universal to families and neighborhoods everywhere across borders and boundaries, cultures and clans.

Marigold Man (or The Marigold Manifesto) – My first novel, about a man who rebels from the safe, perfection-obsessed society around him by planting marigolds in public places.  What starts as a solo venture expands to a team and then a virtual army of marigold planters.  Will he lose everything he values in the process or change the world with marigolds?

Leave a Reply