David Klein's Blog, page 6

The Rabbit Hex

Winter felt long and imagine my pleasure seeing the first brave flowers of spring, these snowdrops stretching and opening between a crack in the rocks. I was so excited I wrote about it. And then visited another harbinger of spring: rabbits. Those darn bunny rabbits ate my pretty flowers down to the bone. “Curse you, […]

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Got Wet at Hands Off

Nature handed us cold, wind, and rain the entire time, and yet the turnout for Hands Off at the New York State Capitol looked to be several thousand Americans who are sick and tired of an authoritarian administration run by a cruel, amoral, abusive, lying felon and his billionaire enablers. Despite the weather, the crowd […]

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The Season Shifts

I savor each season in its turn and yet I wait for the first sign of the next, the emerald tree canopy of summer, the crisp red leaves of autumn, the first snowflakes from the sky, and now, finally—I’ve been looking, waiting, hoping—the nascent blooms of spring I spotted today, elbowing their way through cracks […]

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“Hammering on Mind’s Door”

For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve kept a notebook, filling dozens of them over the years. Some I still have, others I’ve mislaid or tossed. My notebooks, both the online and paper versions, serve a hybrid function—as a fiction workplace for story ideas, character sketches, plot premises, what-ifs; and also as a […]

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We All Dissociate

In my novel, In Flight, the main character, Robert Besch, suffers from a severe psychological disturbance called dissociative fugue—“a form of amnesia characterized by temporary loss of your identity and unplanned travel or wandering without apparent purpose.” It is typically triggered by extreme stress or emotional trauma. Robert survives a harrowing plane crash and risks […]

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THe Winds of Change

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the U.S. scientific and regulatory agency that studies and predicts changes in the environment. The agency’s mission includes weather forecasts, storm warnings, and climate monitoring. Management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Prevention and control of invasive species. International cooperation. NOAA also collects, analyzes, and reports on a […]

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Involuntary Memories

The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day […]

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I Have a Lot of Smpathy for Great Writing

I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found […]

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Poverty is a Choice

It’s never too late to go back to school to learn something new, and with that in mind I enrolled in the UC Berkeley course “Wealth and Poverty” taught by the economist Robert Reich. The course consisted of fourteen lectures, recorded in a classroom at Berkeley in 2023, and is now free to the public. […]

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Silvery

Where the sky and sea and shore converge upon a single color: silver–how inspired a child would be to write a poem, but no word in the world rhymes with silver, so go with silverish or even silvery: a view so brilliantly silvery we are compelled to gaze upon its mystery–it’s not visual trickery but […]

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