We held hands, father and I, Saturday nights, as we skipped down 108th Street to the newsstand. We bought the early edition of the Sunday Times and a Hershey bar. How I loved getting drunk off the newsprint, the rank smell of almost-dry ink, the way black bled onto my fingers. Read more

How many of us appreciate the miracle that is our breath? Appreciate our bodies—our whole bodies, including our curves, our folds, our very flesh? What do breath, the body, and our feelings about both, have to do with writing anyway? If you were to ask Gayle Brandeis what breath and the body have to do…

Diane Gottlieb: At the Public Library— Surrounded by the Likely –after Megan Fernandes I am being interrogated by all the things I do not believe in. But even in this room where our thoughts are still free, where the musty smell of page upon page bound hard between covers or paperbacks, especially here, I feel…

We’re living in trying, maddening, exhausting times. I often find myself at a loss as to what to do with all the anger and fear. Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo channeled hers into poetry, and the resulting book, Catastrophic Molting, is a brilliant, impassioned, and urgent collection. Shimshon-Santo introduces the book with a poem titled “declaration,” her acknowledgment…

We did it for the first time in a Holiday Inn on Jericho Turnpike. Like teenagers — but in our 50s — Steven and I “got a room.” When we were young, we worried about our parents catching us. Now, we had our own teenagers to sneak around. I was working in a preschool program…

Chapter 2: “Three Former ‘Criminals’” in the anthology What is a Criminal?

Interview by Diane Gottlieb Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death is a memoir about facing a marriage’s last act as a couple united in mind and holding hands. Deirdre and Bob are married eleven years and have two young children when forty-three-year-old Bob is diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral…

BackStory: Five Questions with Diane Gottlieb Author of From Here to Eternity What inspired you to write ‘From Here to Eternity’? My mother-in-law is 98 years old! She lived with us until she needed memory care, and now she is in a lovely facility—and strings lots of beads. I often think about what it must be…

So, I’m going to live forever. Living forever was never my plan but it must be God’s because I’m 98 and while I’ve lost a few teeth and my bladder control (keep that to yourself, will you?), I have every marble I came to earth with in ’24. Same year as Marlon Brando (be still…

Susan Triemert’s brilliant collection of flash essays Guess What’s Different opens with Triemert strapped into a slow-moving ambulance: “Ambulances are for emergencies, right? You realize that yours, the one you’re strapped into, has two jobs: to carry you from one hospital to another. And to keep you safe—from yourself. …” Triemert is being transported from the ER…