Does a battle assume there has been a victory? Writing has a threshold that must be crossed, marking the departure from everyday life and...

McSorley’s. 2003. I just finished Dwight Garner’s “A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan” in The New York Times (December 14, 2012). I’m...

I was putting together another post on Amtrak when I stumbled across a New York Times Opinion on Amtrak’s Quiet Car by Tim Krieder. The...

Business travel breeds ideas. My business trips involve some off days, waiting around at my destination, combined with really long...

I moved into New York City proper in 2005, and while my journalling habits have given way to blogging, research writing, and fiction, I...

No, we aren’t looking to move! But I was flipping through a book in which I kept notes about my apartment hunt in 2005. I had 54...

Teresa Carpenter does not arrange the selected snippets of text in a chronological order. Instead, she starts with January 1, and then...

I’ve been working on a short story for years about a friendship slipping into an unfamiliar place. One of these days I’ll fish it out of...

Preserved original stretch of the Lincoln Highway, between Rochelle and Geneva, Illinois. RL Fifield, 2005. First designated in 1913, the...

Preserved original stretch of the Lincoln Highway, between Rochelle and Geneva, Illinois. RL Fifield, 2005. First designated in 1913, the...

Grand Central Terminal. RL Fifield photo. When I leave the city, it’s either on a plane or a train. On a plane, you have little sense of...

Grand Central Terminal. RL Fifield photo. When I leave the city, it’s either on a plane or a train. On a plane, you have little sense of...