How We Care. My Father.
When a father helps his son, they both laugh. When a son helps his father, they both cry. Yiddish proverb. One of the most consequential decisions of my life was to bring my parents from Poland to the United States. While they were getting older, I realized my parents’ future looked grim in Poland. Communism […]
Francis Robicsek, the Renaissance Man.
He was Hungarian. His name, however, like the name of the city he was born, Miskolc, was Slavic. He came from the part of Eastern Europe which for a long time was dominated culturally and politically by the Austrians, and the borders between the nations were in constant flux. He grew up in a country […]
The Past
The past is never dead, and is not even past… William Faulkner
Writing Emotions
It’s not what happens to the people on the page, it’s about what happens to the reader. Gordon Lish
Getting Older
Getting older is raising from the ground up, seeing less details, but having better overview. When up, one suddenly realizes he’s at peace. High in space, there’s no noise, quiet and the air is cleaner. You see only important things.
The Plague
The choice seemed perfect. I read James Michener’s Hawaii while on vacations on Kauai and his Poland––knowing history of this country well. Reading Camus’ masterpiece now, when coronavirus is raging, lets me the current events with a different acuity. I don’t plan to relate the story in more detail. Enough to say, it’s about the […]
A Word About Puzzles
Recently a friend of mine wrote his first blog. https://puzzlingdotblog.wordpress.com/ We started our conversations in jacuzzi in our fitness club. They were as quirky as unusual was our meeting place. The noise in hot tub limits parts of conversations. But you know from the beginning what some people are born writers. For me, conditio sine […]
Alan Heathcock’s 27 Tenets of writing fiction
This post was written on a Twitter request by people looking for this excellent writing advice given by an American fiction writer Alan Heathcock. It is re-posted as-is, preserving the original formatting and syntax. Posted on the request on Twitter by Ann Murphy,@Gaiamethod
Writer’s life
It would be a mistake to treat any novel as autobiography. Rather, it’s an author’s insights into life’s secret places. Robert McKee.
