What inspires you? The late fiction writer Edward D. Hoch, who published more than 900 mystery stories, including one every month for 35 years in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, must have found his inspiration in hardware stores, Walmarts, old Sears catalogs, and his own garage and attic. Hoch’s obituary in the New York Times (January […]

You know how it is. You’ve worked hard all week saving orphans from fires, framing condos, sewing up knife wounds, digging coal from deep caverns, painting interior walls and trim for senators, forging steel death machines, composing reams of prose that will probably win a Pulitzer – basically being industrious and brilliant, just like Mom […]

Burritos! Quesadillas! Flank steak on the grill! Anything on the grill!  My friends and I were tending the grill while our wives drank wine on the patio and we fell into discussing the cultural phenomenon of men taking over in the kitchen. Just about every man we know under the age of 60 does most […]

Ah, the season of bounty! Morels started popping weeks ahead of schedule here in northern Michigan and are still going strong. I found a couple on March 26, a consequence of that freakish spell of hot weather that everyone is still talking about — first time ever I’ve found them during that month when the […]

What an honor  it is for an author to learn that his work is giving a reader he has never met some much needed comfort in a comfortless place. This is a young soldier named Nick Warren, on patrol in northern Afghanistan, reading my memoir of growing up outdoors, A Place on the Water. Nick […]

Favorite Books Now and then I’m asked to list my favorite authors and books. The answer’s always tricky because the list is quite long and, besides, often changes. To narrow it down for the most recent request (five favorite books for the Horizon Books website) I went to my bookshelves looking for the books that […]

Abundance: The Documentary Many days I would cheerfully trade my pen and paper for a state-of-the-art video camera. Cinema is so clearly the dominant artistic medium of our age that we who practice older arts often wonder if we’ve become irrelevant. Not yet! I shout, despite the seeping doubt — and the tottering piles of […]

Simplify, Simplify For years Gail and I have been trying to simplify our lives, but we haven’t made much headway. The effort always makes me think of Thoreau, who famously scolded us to “simplify, simplify,” then set to work weaving a deliciously intricate tapestry of a book. It’s as it should be. Books are like […]

Just Curious We’re drowning in information but we don’t know diddly. For a few thousands years we’ve labored tirelessly to fill our libraries and databases with notions, theories, observations, opinions, wishes, dreams, passionate outcries, wild imaginings, shameful whining, obstinate dogma, and pointless babble — but we still don’t know how we got on this rock […]

More of the Harmoniously Random Here’s the word-drunk philosopher and novelist William Gass, in one of my favorite quirky and hard-to-classify books, On Being Blue, his single-breathed triumphant aria in celebration of every blue thing under (and in) the sky: “There’s the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear… absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue […]