Mozart and the Tour du Mont Blanc
Dispatch Summer 2023 This is my Tour du Mont Blanc journal. The Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) is a 100-mile loop hike around the Mont Blanc massif in the French, Italian and Swiss Alps. It is not a new hike that I am inventing; I am doing a hike that many others have done and […]
Of flowers and soil
Snapshot 17 July 2023 CAPE TOWN, South Africa—When you start calling yourself a writer there is the imagined expectation that each word you write will be an alchemical mixture of, at the least, sunlight and gold. Sometimes that is the case, but writing is as much about the glittering nuggets made of sunlight and gold […]
Cape Town’s cable car
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—I am a journalist living in Cape Town, South Africa. The writing I do here comes from “listening to the city and its people” and writing down what both have to say. Cape Town could be any city or place. There is no specific reason why I am writing about Cape Town […]
A café encounter
Words conjured by sunlight and a mountain in Cape Town. 31 December 2022 CAPE TOWN, South Africa—There was a woman sitting in a window of a café. The woman wore a black tee and she sat hunched over a laptop and an empty plate. Then a man entered the café. He went there because he […]
The cauldron of all lovely things
9 Dec. 2022 COSTA MESA, Calif.—The best stories are the ones that seem to’ve grown directly out of the planet or plucked straight out of the air upon which they had been fluttering from somewhere mysterious and magical, like a butterfly. They reveal something to you that feels as natural as the air but which, […]
The Annihilation of Boulder, Colorado
10 July 2022 BOULDER, Colo.—I am standing at a bus station, watching the annihilation of Boulder, Colorado. I used to live in Boulder and I visited the city so I could see a dear friend who lives here and who will soon move away. Returning to Boulder was like stepping into a memory; I walked […]
Brief burst of color (Jixuan is a rainbow)
BOULDER, Colo.—How do you write about a photograph? How do you capture with words what you captured with light? How do you capture with words exactly how you felt when you took the photo, when how you felt existed in your mind only for a flash? There’s a curious thing that happens after you spend […]
Chronicle of a story
I’m writing about a story I’m writing. 6 June 2022 COSTA MESA, Calif.—I created this newspaper so I could write about what I wanted to write about. It was an act of rebellion as much as it was an act of desperation, because as a journalist writing all the time for other places you often […]
Rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude
24 April 2022 NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez again for the second time, four years after my first pass at it, and I feel I could live my whole life and still discover new lovely things in the book’s pages. I sat and read in the sun […]
Phoenix & Cricket is done
I am more ecstatic than I can describe to finally be able to announce that my website and online newspaper, Phoenix & Cricket, after so many years of tinkering and imagining, is done. There are no true beginnings to things, but if I had to pick one for Phoenix & Cricket, it would be a […]