For more than five years, I wrote a weekly opinion column for The Perry County Times and its affiliated papers in southcentral Pennsylvania. I saw this as a way to give something back to the rural community where we have a little farm called Pencil Creek, but the columns become an important part of my writing rhythm. In the world of novel-writing, where six months’ work can vanish in an instant and completion dates are reckoned in years, it’s not a bad thing to have a weekly deadline.
From time to time, when I wrote on a topic of regional or national interest, I published one of these pieces in a larger newspaper, but mostly they’re a reflection of my state of mind in any given week. Not to mention a launching-pad for my curiosity!
Here’s a complete archive of my Op-Eds. There are over 300 of them. Perhaps you’ll find one or two that agree with you…
You Can’t Keep a Good Book Down
People do all kinds of things in a deer stand. Why not read? I'm not sure how it came to me, but some time before the first day of rifle season, I decided to download Anna Karenina to my iPod and read while I hunted. This was before I understood how much territory a...
Out with the old and in with the…what?
New Year's cartoons have always confused me a little. On the surface, they seem simple enough: Baby New Year, a plump and eerily precocious infant, confronts Father Time, a skinny old geezer with a sickle. Somewhere in the frame, either in the old guy's gnarled...
The sex life of that drone outside your window
Sometimes a column will take a radical turn, thanks to an accident of research. For example, this week’s piece on drones. Inspired by Amazon.com’s recent public relations coup, a video of a package being delivered from warehouse to homeowner’s patio by a GPS-guided...
Catering to the childhood collector within
When I was a boy, sometimes I'd retreat to the privacy of my bedroom, carefully close the door, and engage in long sessions of quiet, but intense, philately. In retrospect, it's hard to understand my youthful devotion to the world of postage stamps. What was it about...
Upwash exploitation and other flying secrets
Our house in Baltimore, which was built when the Great Fire of 1904 was a recent memory, has walls like a bunker: a heavy layer of concrete stucco slathered on courses of thick ceramic block. This makes for quiet nights in winter, when the windows are shut tight...
Swedish shout-pants and other unspeakable games
Early this winter, our daughter brought home something she picked up in school that went on to infect the entire household. Symptoms included lingering for hours at the dining room table; bursts of mean-spirited laughter; random acts of mercy and revenge; and the...
What writers dream of and secretly dread
My novel Marshlands, the product of nearly five years of writing and revision, hits bookstores this week. I'm incredibly proud of the book and optimistic that it's going to be well received, but the truth is that a modern book launch is something of an anticlimax....
When a ghostwriter steps out of the shadows
I'm listening to a piece of modern music as I write this: Symphony No. 1 “Hiroshima,” by the Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi. I suppose the word to describe it is “workmanlike.” The opening is impressive, a powerful attack by percussion and horns presaged by an...
So this is where the magic happens?
One of the great thrills of my early writing life was visiting a former professor at his home in north London near Hampstead Heath. He was a well known novelist at the time; since then his fame has only grown. And I was going to have dinner with him! He lived on a...
Ask not for whom the hound howls…
The golden years haven't been so golden for Brooke, our basset hound. When she joined our family in 2007, she was already a somewhat matronly creature enjoying a healthy middle age. The basset rescue people didn't know her exact birth date, but they told us to think...
An eternal verity we can rely on
In a letter to a friend on November 13th, 1789, Benjamin Franklin hedged his hopes for the newly minted United States Constitution with the now famous words, “...of course, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” To death and taxes, one might add “extinction” to...
Rewriting the humiliations of Sevastopol
In November of 1854, a handsome Russian count with closely trimmed, dagger-shaped whiskers and a thin mustache that betrayed his relative youth, rowed ashore to participate in his country's heroic defense of Sevastopol, then under siege by the French and British. The...
Crowdsourcing a search and rescue
Today is Thursday, March 13th -- in other words, it's last Thursday -- and right now, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is an utter mess. By the time you read this, I fervently hope, for the sake of the families and friends of the passengers, that the...
The Birth and Death of the Atomic Age
I'm in New Mexico at the moment, sitting in the lobby of the Alamogordo Fairfield Inn and Suites Hotel, trying to ignore the Muzak and the huge saltwater aquarium, which was designed to distract the dust-blinded traveler from the fact that he's in one of the driest...
Water and Guns, Lifeblood of the West
Taylor Creek, a meandering stream high in the Gila Wilderness, is on average about five feet wide and a foot or so deep. It would hardly qualify as a rivulet in Perry County, but fresh water is extremely scarce in New Mexico, even in the mountains. For the Chiricahua...