We arrived in Amsterdam in November, 2018, and the Covid pandemic began (although it wasn’t declared as such officially) a little more than a year later. I knew enough about viruses and public health from my research to make me withdraw from all sorts of socializing well before it was declared a pandemic by the WHO. It’s hard enough to integrate into a new city and country without a pandemic, and that first year of Covid-19 was tough. In this essay, I talk about what the Covid-19 pandemic was like in Amsterdam, seen from a year in.

Metta for My Abuser, July 2022 issue, Lion’s Roar.
Read on the Lion’s Roar website, or download.

The Buddhist practice of metta (lovingkindness) begins with compassion for the self and successively expands to include those nearest and dearest, then neutral people (the folks at the farmer’s market) and then those to whom it is almost impossible to extend any good will.

My father was in that last group as far as I was concerned, and it wasn’t until he’d been dead for several years before I was able to understand the terrible trauma that was behind the brutal father my siblings and I had endured. By then it was too late to tell him I forgave him, but it wasn’t too late for me to be healed.

This is the true story behind the short story (fiction), Toothache, which appeared in Fiction on the Web.

Questa è Guerra: Musings on Peter Paul Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents,
The Ekphrastic Review Magazine 
(Download)

Ekphrastic writings are those that respond to a work of art. The Ekphrastic Review literary magazine regularly releases challenges — mostly paintings — to which writers respond in poetry or prose. My piece was a short essay on the impact of visual representations of war on my life, beginning with my mother taking me to see Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and ending with me wandering in 2015 into a museum in Padua, Italy, where they were showing a special photography exhibit: Questa è Guerra: This is War.

Our politicians are sometimes inclined to glamorize war, but they would never send their own children into battle, and if they see war coming, they’ll get their families away from danger.

Aesop and Doña Flor, in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Winter 2022.

Doña Flor had two husbands — one dead and one alive — but both wanted to make love to her. Some decisions are truly difficult. In this essay, I looked at the question of where to live — in the countryside, for close access to nature, or in the city, for the culture and social connections? I still don’t have the answer.