2025

Hello Friends.  I hope you are doing well. As the year ends, we all have a tendency to get wistful. I get it. Things end and begin, and we reflect. I totally understand this idea, but keep in mind that calendars are a construct. Not only is it not the end of 2025 on the Hebrew and Chinese calendars, but they have totally different New Year’s days. So, really, maybe instead of being contemplative just at the end of the year, I would like to advocate for doing some deep thinkin

Hello Friends. I was traveling for work last week, and I had the opportunity to go see a colleague’s mixed media art installation. He used pencils, crayons, paint, paper, and scraps of old paper palettes. Alone, any one of the works of art would have been interesting, but hung in a series, they were different. Seeing them the way he wanted us to see them, in that room, in that order, made a difference to me. Something in him had him make this art and hang it that way, in that

Hello Friends, As you may know by now, Universal Truth is out in the universe now. I am so proud of this book, of this series, of the whole thing. I am now officially halfway through the series. Well, I’m halfway through the fifth book in the series, but the world has the first three. It is really like an out-of-body experience every day. With The Austen Chronicles, I’ve done my best to write a love letter to Jane Austen, while creating my own stories. If I didn’t think I wa

Hello Friends.  Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it is sort of worth telling again. When I told Lea that I had been...

Hello Friends, In my younger, and more vulnerable years, I was given a book that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Like most...

Hello Friends, The late, great, Floridian poet said, “ The waiting is the hardest part .” For real, Mr. Petty. I feel you, sir. Waiting...

Happy Summer Solstice, friends. Where I live, it has been summer for a while, so the “first day of summer” is just a day on the calendar....

Hello Friends,  My day job, as a Dean, consists of finding ways to grow my program while putting out fires in the day-to-day running of...

Hello friends,   Can you believe it's April? It seems like it should be October by now, doesn’t it? I think part of my problem with the...

Hello friends. While I write this, spring has not yet sprung, we are still a few days away from making it official, but it is March and...

Greetings from Snowy Michigan. I’ve capitalized the S in snowy as I firmly believe Snowy Michigan is a real, solid place and thus worthy...

Hello friends. Happy New Year to you. I hope you have found a way to focus on something good. As I said last year, in my January essay, I...