reader & writer
“I put on my pajamas and bathrobe and my old hunting hat,
and started writing the composition….”
~ Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
BORN LUCKY New from Rain Mountain Press
16-year old Evening Star believes she’s destined to win the Millennium Baby Contest. The first baby born in New York City will win a million dollars.
Now she needs a partner to pull off this scheme….
“Sarah McElwain brings the bad old East Village of the nineties totally alive again – sights, sounds, culture, and more than that, its very soul. Filtered through the eyes of a teenage girl growing up there, in a story that is wry and bittersweet.”
~ Jonathan Stone, author of Moving Day and The Prison Minyan
“Before the dark side of the Internet and TikTok, there were the false promises of TV and the tabloids. Part love affair, part loss of innocence, part plight of a teenage girl immersed in survival, BORN LUCKY invites the reader into the tragic, naive truth about how popular culture devours teenage girls.”
~ Susannah Marren, author of Maribelle’s Shadow
Classically trained Shakespearean actors decide to send up the greatest Elizabethan plays in a free-spirited traveling circus.
A collection of 120 table blessings that include a wide range of sentiments, from amusing and heartfelt to the sacred.
How to write & deliver a great wedding toast, including rehearsal dinners, showers and bachelor parties.
essays & fiction
essays & fiction
“Fingertips Part Three With Thanks to Stevie Wonder”
A personal essay about teaching yoga to the blind, anthologized in The Art of Touch, University of Georgia Press Edited by Joan Schweighardt & Faye Rapoport DesPres
“Spike”
Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Brazen words by witty dames. Everything true. More or less.
Edited by Rebecca Johnson & Bex O’Brian
“The Crossing Guard”
Works Progress, A little Substack for big fiction.
Edited by Mark Chiusano & Scott Chiusano
“The Adventures of God”
Speakeasy #5, The Heresy Press Newsletter.
Edited by Bernard Schweizer
I currently teach an online Memoir Over-50 Class at Pulitzer-prize winning poet Philip Schultz’s Writers Studio.
For a decade, I co-hosted Writers Read NYC, providing downtown performance venues for writers in The Cornelia Street Café, Sidewalk Café, Le Poisson Rouge and The Slipper Room.
I taught a weekly Yoga for the Blind class at the Lighthouse Guild for ten years. “Fingertips Part Three with Thanks to Stevie Wonder,” in The Art of Touch, is about this experience.
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Working as a graphic designer for decades, book design remains my first love.
Thank you to The New York Public Library for hundred of free books, returned almost always on time.
In The Cross he shows how the Protestant churches we attended turned into consumer-driven Evangelical congregations.
In The Station Wagon he reveals how liberal Democratic values talked racial equality, but used the secrecy of the ballot to vote no to low-income housing to keep the suburbs white and middleclass.
The first time I heard Bill McKibben speak was at Occupy Wall Street through a bullhorn. More recently, in the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City, delivering a sermon that turned the story of Job into a climate crisis parable.
One of my North Stars, he’s co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world. A founder of Third Act, a community of Americans over sixty determined to change the world for the better.
Bill McKibben says this is the only memoir he is likely to read. I’m glad he wrote this one. He explains what went wrong in our New England childhoods. In The Flag he documents what wasn’t in our history books—the role avery played in the North. And talks abut the meaning of patriotism. In The Cross he shows how the Protestant churches we attended turned into consumer-driven Evangelical congregations.