Writing

I have been a writer for a long time, it just took me a while to realize it. In high school I was considered by my teachers to be a bad writer because I never cared much about the rules of spelling or grammar. I should have told them that in the future something called Microsoft Word would take care of that for me. Good writing, as it turns out, is less about following rules then about being able to conjure up a compelling paragraph out of thin air. 

As an assistant to politicians I learned the art of writing dry memos.  As an advocate I learned how to write opinion articles that could be persuasive in 750 words. When I wrote my first book (about California ballot politics) I learned how to write something that took months.  When I wrote a book about Bolivia with a group of young people, I learned the joy of teaching writing to others.

I wrote a novel once. It was a terrible book but a great experience. I wrote it on a series of trips over several years to a small town in the Bolivian mountains. These journeys always began with a half-day’s ride in a rickety bus through barren plains then a green cloud forest. On arrival I planted myself alone in the same rickety room in the same a rickety old hotel on the main plaza, and for a week at a time I lived in the novel and ignored the clock. Later I put the creativity that I learned from that experience into a different and much better book, a family memoir of our time in Bolivia, My Other Country.

Today I write regular columns for two publications, the 199-year-old daily Lockport Union-Sun and Journal (in the town where I now live) and the New York Review of Books Daily. Here is an assorted  collection of my writings, some recent and some not, some serious and some not, which I hope you will enjoy.