🙏 Winter 2023 “Share Drive”
The quarterly round up of essays and fiction. A box of secrets, a birthday well spent, a childhood in Italy, evenings alone in a Maine summer house and time as a young actor on a film set.
My quarterly “share drive.” Please visit (or revisit) these posts from October - December, and if there was one essay that was special share it with your communities and networks. A link and a thoughtful word from you brings people here and connects all three parties.
This was a great quarter for subscriptions. I’m deeply grateful to all of you that have shared my work, liked and commented on the pieces and “restacked” me. The confirmation of an audience for my writing and the growth over the last few months has been wonderful. 🙏
40 states 🗽🇺🇸 and 38 countries 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇦🇺 🇮🇹 now. That’s very special.
Reception to “A Box of Rain” my participation in ’s Same Walk, Different Shoes project was warmly received and deeply gratifying to write. I’m encouraged to write more fiction in the months to come. Here, the story of a woman who makes a startling discovery cleaning up her childhood home after the death of her father.
A Box of Rain
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The stor…
This simple description of a birthday well spent resonated.
Peace
“Thunder on the mountain, rolling like a drum, Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music coming from” – Bob Dylan It was my birthday, but I kept to my early morning clockwork schedule: up at 5 AM for coffee and hobbies: French flash cards, ear training and writing. I cleaned up the following Saturday’s post.
The core of the fall essays have been related to the memoir of my first family. I’ve progressively gathered them here. There are only a few Arabian Nights to go now.
👉II - My Father might be the most personally meaningful essay I’ve ever written. The last two paragraphs of 📸IX - Ephemera are practically a mission statement. ♒️XI - The Aquarian a reflection on my mother that struck a chord.
This feels like ages ago now, but here are the bundled essays about my childhood in 🇮🇹Bergamo, Italy confronted with the bitter end of my parent’s marriage, a strange new world, my mother’s illness, and life seen through the eyes of a 7-year-old.
Threshold
It was a year of deep and permanent impressions. I was seven, and my mother, my brother and I lived in Bergamo, Italy. At the age of seven, as you may remember, your personality is ready to be lifted from the potter’s wheel and held up in the air like a newborn. You are nearing completion, yet you remain under the potter’s influence: the delicate spout s…
From a bet with fraternity mates about getting into the 🎥 movies to a breakthrough role in Parting Glances, here are the collected essays to date about a surprise, but difficult acting career.
🎬 Actor – Full Text
Chapter 1 – The Bet “I’ll bet you a $100 I can get into a movie in ten screen tests.” It was the summer after my Freshman year at Columbia. I rented a room in a fraternity on 113th Street, a few blocks south of campus. For $150 a month I didn’t have to return home, possibly, hopefully, ever again. I was addicted to New York City. Leaving the city was like…
I care deeply about the evil of long-term solitary confinement and what it does to everyone involved. This is a small area where I’ve been able to make a difference through correspondence with men in long-term solitary confinement.
Even the Vile
In July of 2019 Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera was sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years to ensure that he would spend the rest of his life incarcerated. If Guzmán doesn’t immediately come to mind, know that he was the notorious drug lord of the Sinaloa Cartel, directly responsible for countless assassinations, mass killings and beheadings. He …
