It was a late September evening in New York City. The UN General Assembly was in session, and with the…

We all live with a profound sense of place, of where we are in the world, of where we reside….

The month of April was a bit unsettled in Connecticut this year. First, we had the earthquake that no one…

On New Year’s Day this year at around 9:30 in the morning, my husband and I were sitting in the…

The pale yellow “favorite blanket” that you had as a child. The hair dryer that covered your head like a…

Another one gone. Another law that was trying to help people. We knew that they were going to do it….

It was a rough five days on and under the seas last week. On June 14th, an overloaded fishing boat…

In the mid-nineteen-nineties, I lived for a summer on Deer Isle, Maine. It was a pretty typical Maine summer. Foggy…

When I taught English in Russia in the late 1990’s, my main place of employment was the Tolyatti Pedagogical Institute,…

The rains came after a week of heat. Finally. Thank God. Prior to their arrival it was baking and Devon,…

So Omicron has arrived with a vengeance and people have started using the dreaded “R” and “D” words again. They…

Watch a video of this blob by going to my You Tube Channel. The text came when we were in…

On the north shore of the Caribbean island of St. Croix, two miles before you reach Cane Bay, there lie…

I didn’t get back up into the hills again for several months. The repeated storms of January and February had…

So they want all the schools to be open again. In 100 days. Or sooner. Get those kids back in…

I took a walk up into the hills yesterday. It was a leaden sunless day, but the temperature had risen…

At 10:45 every morning, one of my elementary ESL classes meets for half an hour online. There are five students…

The painted stones began to appear in late April along the unpaved road that ran past the house that had…

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

“Are we still going to do Google Meets over the summer?” one of my fifth-grade students asked me at eleven…

Corona in Connecticut, and Italy, and the UK, and California...

The Venetians have gotten their city back. Certainly not the way they wanted to get it back, not as the…

It’s that time of year again, Black History Month, the month when I once again try to explain to nine…

Everyone wants to be liked, Americans, I think, more than most people, and English husbands of American wives want their…

The defining chant of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign is almost certainly going to be “send her back.”

That’s right, you heard me, SOCIALISM. It seems that these days some people actually stand up and announce that they…

Want to watch a video of me reading this blog? Go to my You Tube Channel. On a cold Sunday…

On November 9th, two weeks after my cousin in Pittsburgh, in her post-shooting gloom, bowed out of all social media,…

On October 29th, two days after a gunman burst into a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa. and shot eleven people dead,…

If you’d asked me before the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings how I felt about them, I’d probably have told you I…

You knew it before you got there, knew it if you’re one of those people who checks weather.com before you…

Fathers, Sheisters, and Other New Yorkers Who Shall Not Remain Blameless

A look at the calendar tells me that Father’s Day is here again. Father’s Day these days, other than being…

If you’d asked me a few years ago, only a few, whether or not I ever read dystopian fiction, I…

I wasn’t going to weigh in on this because, well, everyone else has, and what am I going to say…

Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austro-Hungarian writer who was born, wrote, and died a long time ago. He was most…

Finally, some good news for a change. Amidst the debacle of “tax reform” and what appears to be rampant sexual…

In the nearly twenty years I’ve been teaching in the US public schools, I’ve had quite a few kids walk…

It’s been the summer of meeting up with former students, students I haven’t seen in more than a decade, a…

A family history is a collection of stories, stories told and retold and made old not so much by the…

Venice is a city of illusions: illusions of water and light, of time and space, of stillness and movement. Looking…

In our elementary school, we start teaching children about character traits in the third grade. We teach them to recognize…

I never marched in a demonstration before yesterday. I don’t like crowds much, or noise, or commotion. I’m a stay-at-home-with-a-book…

At the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, there was a period of time, eight months and one…

Last week didn’t begin well. On Monday afternoon, we had to hospitalize our cat, Socrates. He’d been battling pancreatitis at…

No one could love Russia more than I do. You have to love a country where the cabbie taking you home…

They say if you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it and this certainly seems to be what’s…

It goes on. Last Sunday morning we woke up to read about yet another mentally ill individual who went out…

Imagine a city where the taxi journey from the airport so satisfies your desire for adventure, your longing for beauty,…

And Now For Something Completely Different

Take heart, readers! This post will not be yet another cry of dismay over the troubling ascendancy of Donald Trump….

There it was again. That feeling. The feeling that I hadn’t felt in a long time, but that I still…

And so it began yesterday upon the frozen fields of Iowa, that great democratic act of choosing. The Iowans have…

As another year draws to its close and the next one edges near, there seems to be in both the…

There are many things I could write about as the dark and confusing year of 2015 draws to its close,…

A flash of light rent the October sky, lasted a few short moments, and then vanished as quickly as it…

In December of 1933, a young man set out from England on a great adventure. His intention was to walk…

My Immigration Was Better Than Your Immigration

You have to feel sorry for the Republicans. They finally manage to field two candidates who speak fluent Spanish, who…

Can you believe it? The maple leaves are starting to turn. It seems like summer, while we’re still in the…

A nation with massive, crushing unemployment, fortunes and life savings disappeared, crowds of desperate citizens protesting in the streets, all…

I can’t remember how long I’d known my first boyfriend before he told me he was Black. I was surprised,…

And so…as the school year draws to its close and the frenzy of testing slows, (but does not yet completely…

When I was in the sixth grade, I read Gone with the Wind for the first time. I read it…

For me, there are three kinds of winters. The first kind is the rainy, gray, damp, but relatively mild winter…

On page 58 of the January 26th issue of The New Yorker, there is a cartoon showing a numb-looking teacher…

When I lived in Russia, my Russian friends used to try to get me to tell them all the things…

There is a widening perception in the country that the American Dream is a tattered and fraying garment slipping quickly…

The summer I traveled to Sweden nearly thirty-five years ago the national news there was full of reports of phantom…

Americans, who tend to shun both the specific and the historical, are today celebrating Veteran’s Day in one great, glorious…

On the southwestern edge of the Wiltshire Downs in England, in the valley of the River Kennet, lies the ancient…

When I was in high school, a friend of mine presented me with a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake…

Normally, when you say you’re writing a letter from somewhere that’s where you are, but our time in England was…

Nadine Gordimer died today, the great South African writer, though I had actually sat down to write about another great…

One of the things the new Common Core emphasizes is the ability to distinguish between serious and not-so-serious sources of…

Keeping on the travel theme, my husband and I had reason to strike out for California last weekend, and if…

The Dutch novelist, poet and journalist, Cees Nooteboom, wrote a wonderful book called Roads to Santiago. In it, the author…

When I was a university student of Russian History in the mid 1980’s, the Iron Curtain was still drawn tightly…

I’ve always found that when I want to understand something that’s happening in Russia, it helps to hit the books….

When you think of Venice in literature, what do you think of? John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice? The novels…

Even I, no nay-sayer of global-warming, have caught myself thinking it. When climatologists repeat their dire prediction that the world’s…

You have to feel sorry for the Russian people. Or you don’t have to, not if you don’t want to,…

Christmas Eve in Bequia is a day of frenzied shopping, for unlike up in the States, no stores down here…

As we sit in front of the television watching football and trying to digest our Thanksgiving dinners, or attempt to…

Well, there’s so much good news to choose from, I hardly know where to start. The Obamacare web site debacle?…

Crumbling provincial towns, the Gypsy wedding of a fourteen year old, the dismal condition of the M10 which connects Petersburg…

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are falling, my wormy quinces are lying under the trees waiting for…

I was watching PBS news the other night and saw an interview with Amanda Ripley, the author of the new…

It’s been a very bad week. First of all, Obama, he’s my guy, but he’s really made a mess of…

Obama has finally figured out what a lot of us could have told him a long time ago: college is…

Okay, if I were the boss of that posh shop in Zurich, Switzerland, Trois Pomme, I would fire the saleswoman…

My husband and I were watching the news last night and out of the chaos of war and royal babies…

So, we went up to Boston, my husband and I, about three months after the Boston bombings and found the…

You remember the 1980 movie “Hopscotch,” don’t you? Walter Matthau played a rogue CIA agent who was publishing a book…

I know I should feel outraged, violated, sullied. When the whistle-blower Edward Snowden this last week let it be known…

Stockholm’s burning. That city I went to 33 years ago as an exchange student in the summer of 1980, that…

Mother’s Day is now a trip to the cemetery for me, I’m afraid. A trip to the florist’s first, of…

When Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the alleged Boston bombers, said this last week that she was sorry the family…

The sign is still there on the side of the school. It has a piece missing from the bottom left…

These days, we don’t go in much for huge Easter feasts with the relatives anymore. Easter is more of a…

I was reading an article about Gorbachev the other day. Gorbachev, remember him? I’m embarrassed to say that until I…

You really have to feel sorry for the French. No matter how bad things ever got over there, no matter…

Remember just two blogs ago, I exhorted all of you to embrace the much maligned winter season? Well, I can…

When I got up this morning, I did check and see who had won yesterday’s game, not because I was…

All right, it’s been pretty cold lately and at the moment it’s raining ice onto my roof. Everyone has been…

Back when I was in high school in the late seventies and early eighties, back in the waning days of…

Let me just get it over with and explain where it is we are. On an island called Bequia which…

There have been days since my father and mother passed away three-and-a-half years and a year ago respectively when the…

“You all memorized the Constitution, right?” the thin, blonde lady immigration officer asked a packed courtroom in Hartford, Connecticut last…

So, Thanksgiving is once more upon us, the season in which where I work, little lines of boys and girls…

When I was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, there was a lecturer there by…

The trial was over. The appeal had failed. The world’s press had gone home when last weekend, Maria Alyokina, age…

So the Taliban are now shooting girls who want to go to school, are they? Not that this is really…

On September 18th, the US government announced that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), after two decades of…

And so another anniversary of the September 11th bombing of the World Trade Center has come and gone replete with…

As if they needed anything else to go wrong, the country of Spain has this last week been battling yet…

What do you think would happen if someone produced a film about George Washington filmed in Botswana with a local…

The Russian Orthodox Church – It’s a Riot!

Let me be very clear, I agree with Madonna, Paul McCartney and Stephen Fry that the three members of the…

Several years ago, on the first day of school, a young child was delivered by their mother to the class…

One summer when I was about ten years old, my mother went to the library to get some novels for…

Aragonese Pyrenees: What Spanish Crisis?

There are fires to the east of us in Catalonia after one of the driest winters on record in the…

It’s raining in London. What a surprise. Yes, but it’s been raining for a long time, practically the whole summer…

Countries really don’t leave each other alone, do they? They are always bothering each other, invading, claiming sovereignty, imposing annoying…

What do you mean the summer’s over? Why it just started didn’t it? I only got out of school last…

The demands of the Russian reformers seemed reasonable enough to me. They wanted the Russian government to stop being so…

“Make hay while the sun shines.” The phrase always had a lascivious ring to it for me. It suggested someone…

Juneteenth is an African-American holiday officially celebrated in 41 states of the United States. It commemorates the final abolition of…

There was a time nearly a hundred years ago when Finns did shoot at other Finns. Depending on who you…

“Whatever you do, don’t go to Gibraltar.” This was what our friends and neighbors down on the Costa del Sol…

I’m going to a wedding in England this summer and I’m pretty pleased about it. Of course, I’ll be happy…

The Helsinki City Council has finally decided. No Guggenheim for them, thank you very much. The city of Helsinki, chosen…

They’ve been muttering about them in Greece, and in Spain, in Portugal and in Italy. All the countries of Europe…

Why did Putin win the Russian elections? He won due to election fraud. Well, yes, there was election fraud, buses…

Back in January, the Finns had an election, too. It was the first round of their presidential election. The Finns,…

Going Places

World map A story, a spice, a map.

Each offers the way into another world, the promise of a journey.

When I was a child, I read stories about places I had never been. Later, as a teenager, I pored over maps and bought cookbooks to make food with ingredients I had to go to special stores to find. Now, the shapes of many of the countries I read about as a child as well as the taste of their food have become old friends. Yet I still reread the old stories, make the favorite dishes, and pour over the maps, repeating the names of cities I’ve lived in as well as the ones I haven’t gotten to yet.

The lure of travel remains all-powerful.

When you travel, you become intimate with the past. People are constantly dragging you to the site of this monument or that battle, into some great church or through the ruins of an abandoned castle. Some of these places leave you cold, others sweep you away. I can still remember the thrill of standing atop the remains of the earthen wall that Peter the Great had built on the Russian steppe to hold off the Tartars, or the clouds of swallows that swept past me through the windows of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

When you travel, you make connections, with people, with places, with ideas you’d never have encountered if you’d stayed at home. You also come up against people or traditions that you don’t like very much. It’s not all wonderful, but it’s real.

When you travel, you experience the ups and downs of life in a particular place, you join in the local rites and celebrations, but you also learn to live with the loneliness of being the outsider, the observer.

I’d like to think travel has made me a better person as well as a better writer. It has taught me the art of restraint as well as self-reflection, both how to be with people and how to be alone. It has taught me to observe a thing both up close and from a distance. It has shown me the marvelous in the small, seemingly uninteresting and insignificant details of everyday life. Above all, it has taught me to look at people and events in my own country as just as interesting and exotic as they are in any other. Nothing is boring. Everything is strange, nothing stranger than what is known.

The views expressed on this web site are the personal views of the author and do not represent the views of the Waterbury Public School System.

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October/November 2024

One of the short stories in my Island Girl series, Graduation Day, has been published in the 2024 Connecticut Literary Anthology in conjunction with Woodhall Press. Unfortunately, there is no online link to the story, but if you would like to hear me reading excerpts from my story, you can RSVP here for the online reading on Wednesday November 13th at 6:30 pm.

April 2024

Check out my essay about the tragic death of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and the repression of independent voices in present day Russia that increasingly mirrors the repression of the Stalin dictatorship. You can read it in Pangyrus Literary Magazine.

Check out my latest short story Island Girls in Marrow Magazine about young girls of color growing up in a neighborhood that isn’t particularly kind to them.

January 2023

I am delighted to announce that Glass Mountain Literary Magazine has published my short story Retention in their current issue. You can read the story here.

September 2022

Watch a video of me reading a live version of a blog about the Berlin Wall, The Wall I Knew.

July 2022

Watch a video of me reading a live version of my blog, The Last of the Best.

May 2022

I’m excited to announce three pieces of my writing have recently been published. What Ever Happened to Igor, an essay in Pangyrus, is about a study trip I took to Ukraine in 1985 with a group of Finns and Swedes. Igor was a young Ukrainian-Swedish man from Stockholm who was going to meet his father in Kyiv, a father he hadn’t seen in twenty years. Want to watch a video of me reading the essay? Click here. Will They Make it Home Again?, another essay in Pangyrus, explores the relationship between the images of World War Two childhood evacuations recorded in select works of European literature and the images of evacuation we now see on our television screens from Ukraine. Click here to watch the video.

Finally, The Longest Day, is a short story published in the 2022 Freshwater Literary Journal. It details the experience of a young non-English speaking Cape Verdean girl, Gee, on her first day in an American inner-city school. It is an account of Gee’s first encounter with her new ESL teacher and the safe space this teacher creates for Gee to express her true emotions. Watch a You Tube video of me speaking with Georbina DaRosa, the real-life inspiration for my story.

Strange Countries

Going Places

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