My blog

My friend and fellow author, Lisa Amowitz, posted these wonderful words and I asked her permission to share them here. If you had challenges in 2015, this is for you: Dear 2015, I know you have [...]

WordPress does this cool thing: at the end of the year, it sends you an email with stats about your blog. I find it nice to look back at my year and see what I’ve accomplished. Here is one [...]

  I’m excited to have been invited to participate in the 2016 Riverdale Literacy Festival in Fort Myers, Florida, in March. I have fellow author friends who have participated and just [...]

I have dressed up the blog with its winter look. Now that I’ve taken to playing around with the header, I feel the need to update it more frequently. (It’s been three different things [...]

Okay, here goes: Trump has a point. If I’m to be the honest, free-thinking person I fancy myself to be, I have to admit it. The point in question was raised in a tweet overnight, in which [...]

Do you think that Star Wars is an epic battle between good and evil? Well, let this mom set you straight. I am not a big Star Wars fan. Which is weird, because I love sci-fi and fantasy. I chalk [...]

Early on in my days as a mother, I promised myself I would never say these two words to my children: “Be careful.” And I’ve tried hard not to. The thought first occurred to me [...]

I never thought it would come to this but it has: I don’t want any more gifts for Christmas. I don’t want my Christmas to be about “stuff” anymore. I have always been a [...]

I thought of the piece I wrote the other day, the one about going to the woods and sitting on a rock to find peace, and then I came across this beautiful poem by Wendell Berry called The Peace of [...]

Today marks 16 years since I first crossed your threshold as your “owner.” You have been so good to me, so today I wanted to thank you. It was right before Christmas. My belly was [...]

Maybe this is true. Or maybe this is the story we tell to get out of emptying the dishwasher. In any event, you’ve been warned.                 [...]

I mostly draw a complete blank in trying to understand war. I think it’s because modern war is such a sanitized thing that it’s hard to understand why we rile ourselves up and press [...]

The question I often ponder is: are people fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? My answer to that depends on the day. And whether or not I’m behind the wheel of a car. It is easy to [...]

Many white men are in trouble. Wages for them have been flat for decades. They see challenges to their supremacy from women, from minorities. Gone are the days when there were enough good blue [...]

Every year, I write down what I want to achieve in the coming year and store it in the Notes on my phone. I read somewhere that it’s best to state resolutions as if they’d already [...]

This is my solstice post from 2014. It bears re-posting on this winter solstice as well: Today is the shortest day of the year.  It’s appropriately gray outside.  The light is dim and [...]

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but when it comes to doing things, I don’t have a great sense of what’s “boy” stuff and what’s “girl” stuff. [...]

The phone rang this morning at 8:05 a.m.. It was a call timed as only someone who knows when I drop off my children at school can time it, because he sometimes shares the chore. “Good [...]

It was 2008. I had just taken a deep breath and told my story of being undocumented for the first time, in a piece published in Newsweek. I braced for the response, fearful of the backlash. What [...]

I have a thing for goats. I could regale you with why, but then you might think I’m weird. Okay, I’ll regale you with why. First, my now-ex-parents-in-law had a goat farm. I used to [...]

Some of my favorite memories of my childhood are of standing in front of the beautiful lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library (named Patience and Fortitude, I came to [...]

Shortly after I moved out at 18 years old, I signed up for one of those old-fashioned book clubs which shipped you out a book a month unless you told them not to. (I had overestimated the [...]

One of the questions I get asked most often during my book events is, “How do you deal with writer’s block?” My answer usually is, “There’s no such thing.” What I don’t usually add is: that’s not [...]

I am fascinated by aberrant human behavior. Give me a documentary about the childhood of a serial killer or a totalitarian ruler, and I’m hooked. What makes people do things most of us [...]

I hadn’t even heard of “Giving Tuesday” last week when I decided it was time to find a new volunteering opportunity. (Giving Tuesday is today, FYI). For me, it just felt like [...]