Like virtually everybody else in the American northwest, this week I am surrounded by smoke. Forest fires, wild fires, caused by nature and caused by mankind, rage all over the western states. In my corner of southeast Washington, wind blowing from any direction...

Nineteen Sixty-Eight. The Vietnam War rages. Peggy Fleming skates her way to Olympic gold. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated. Richard Nixon is elected president. Star Trek episode “Plato’s Children” features the first-ever interracial kiss...

If you’re like me, lately you’ve been obsessing about the world coming to an end. Whether it happens as the result a scuffle between nuclear powers, is a picture-perfect playing out of the Book of Revelations, or the result of the Universe reaching the limits of its...

This doesn’t happen to me very often, but today I’m going to stall, stall, stall. There are too many things to write about and think about. No single idea will rise above the others, regardless of the many inflammatory topics making the rounds on Facebook. You know...

Today’s meditation is on being fat. Here’s my story: I was a fat child. I might even have qualified as obese. At age eleven I was 5’3” and weighed 133 pounds. I wore a junior size 15. My measurements were 36”-36”-36”. From memory and photographic evidence, I had...

Writers, sometimes, get a bad rap. We’re characterized as brooding, overly sensitive, obsessed with our work. Writers with young children at home are known to say, “Don’t interrupt me when I’m writing unless there’s blood.” This week I’ve enlisted Bruce Matley, the...