2015 Highlights

Looking back on some favorite memories from 2015… February: My wife snapped this photo while we were in Door County, Wisconsin. That’s frozen Lake Michigan in the background. March: I stopped for a couple of days in Oklahoma to visit family here. Here I am beneath a statue of Standing Bear, the great chief of the Ponca Nation, … Read more

Why Libraries?

Tomorrow, I’ll drive almost three hundred miles to present a program at a library in Ponca, Nebraska, a town with a population of less than a thousand people. At a recent signing, a guy who’d seen the event calendar on my website asked me, as if I was crazy, “Why would a New York Times … Read more

Magna Cum Murder

I’ve been getting a lot questions about Magna Cum Murder, the wonderful mystery conference in Indianapolis next fall at which I’ll be a guest of honor.  Because it’s both intimate and vibrant, this conference is a perennial and special favorite of mine.  Kathryn Kennison, the lovely moving force behind everything, has been staging this gathering … Read more

The Quiet Horizon

As another year is about to sink completely into the realm of memory, I can’t help but look back and marvel. I couldn’t have asked for, hoped for, or even, if I’d been able, crafted for myself a better twelve months. It’s been filled with the fruit of many labors. An old book greatly honored, … Read more

The Days Run Away

One of my favorite lines of poetry comes from Charles Bukowski, the great California poet, novelist, and postal worker:  “And the days run away like wild horses over the hills…”   I watch them go now, the days, in exactly the way Bukowski said, and every year they seem to vanish faster than before.  What they … Read more