The day after Thanksgiving, I hiked near Carson Pass alongside a young woman soon to graduate from Stanford with a degree in English and creative writing. We were hiking at around 7,500 feet elevation through old snow on a treeless ridge when a blizzard crept in. Through the freezing wind the senior described her difficulties [...]

….Even before the menus were handed out, you could see what sort of a place this was. Order the pork and it might resemble a rough-hewn raft, stranded by tides on a narrow beach of polenta. Fish might come with shredded turnips or a pabulum of coddled fruit. The younger an ingredient, the more highly [...]

“…a huge amount of writing takes place in your subconscious mind. It is being formed by your inner thoughts before you become aware of it. … Your subconscious mind is toying with it and it will come to you – like a forgotten name or the clue to a crossword puzzle – when you cease [...]

Last year I volunteered for the first time to campaign in a presidential election. My assignment for the Obama team was in Carson City, Nevada, forty miles from my home in northern California. Was I nervous? Very. Any disturbed occupant might wing open a door and argue me and my canvassing partner speechless. Lucky for [...]

From Thomas Swick’s book of essays, A Way to See the World
In his wonderful opening biographical essay, Swick expresses the yearning he felt during a post-college stint at a language school in Provence:
“There was something about the landscape, too, so lauded by others, that depressed me. The earth was harsh and dry and lacking in [...]

Last fall, in a quest to run across America in record time, Marshall Ulrich covered  the equivalent of two marathons plus a 10-kilometer run – every day for 52.5 days. Lying in motel beds at night, his sore feet nested in ice packs, he would doze off past midnight. Waking five hours later, he’d squeeze into [...]

To appreciate the final lines of Gary Shteyngart’s Travel & Leisure essay, “To Russia for Love,” you have to read the beginning of the essay first:
“Only love is matter,” some besotted loverboy has scrawled along one of St. Petersburg’s ethereal romantic canals. Whether this is merely bad English or some newfangled law of physics we [...]

Behind the chain-link fence the jaguar prowled, his tail whipping back and forth, his lips parting to expose long ivory teeth. On the viewing bench, Blake and I leaned into each other. So far today everything had gone well: this morning the bus left on time from San Ignacio, it dropped us off at the [...]

Welcome to my Face to Face blog, where you’ll get to know a little bit about me and what goes on in the universe around me. Thank you for visiting and please check back frequently.
Oh yeah, the http://www.ReadWriteShoot.com website has launched. It is my publishing platform for my writing and photography work. Please peruse it [...]