Archive for writing

Signing “Sandy”

March 29, 2026 books, Nature, Uncategorized, writing No comments

Today I had the honor of signing a copy of my book, “Sandy: The Story of a Young Dune,” for a woman who called me out of the blue and told me she would be honored if I would consent to sign the copy that she bought for her new grandson, whose name happens to be Sandy.


I assured her that the honor would be all mine.


For one thing, I was so impressed that Sharon Meyers tracked me down. With a bit of internet sleuthing she found my phone number. She called me one day last week when I was entertaining my grandchildren at Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry during their spring break. But we arranged a meeting at my home in Chesterton when she and her husband would be en route from their Evanston, IL, home to their vacation home in nearby Michigan City, IN.


My son, Cory Falk, agreed to come next door from his home to photograph me and Sharon so I could memorialize the event on my website blog.


What a fun and fascinating lady! I am new to this book signing business, but if every interaction with a purchaser is as interesting as today’s, I could happily sign books all day.


Sharon and I have a lot in common. She said she just completed a writing residency in Japan and she is well versed in Japanese culture. I studied Japanese tea ceremony and spoken and written Japanese some years ago, though I have only been to the Narita Airport near Tokyo, on my way to Nepal.


She also does food writing and cooking classes. I’ve done my share of food writing and when she gifted me a container of artisan Japanese salt I had to mention articles I’ve written about salt and Portland, Oregon’s own selmelier, Mark Bitterman.


As for my book, “Sandy: The Story of a Young Dune,” I published it through Amazon last year, but interest in it seems to be growing as 2026 is the 100th anniversary of the opening of Indiana Dunes State Park. I wrote and illustrated the story of the Dunes, as told by a young sand dune. I included the science of dune succession and the history of both the state park and the national park at the Indiana Dunes. It’s currently for sale at the Indiana Dunes Visitors Center, the Nature Center gift shop in the Indiana Dunes State Park, and at the nearby Schoolhouse Shop.

SANDY. Written and illustrated by me!


Sandy is also available at Amazon.com for $12.99. I am thrilled each time someone tells me they love my book and asks me to sign it.

Zoom Bloom: Bloomsday in a Time of Coronavirus

June 16, 2020 personalities, travel, writing No comments

James Joyce

It was exactly 50 years ago that I attended my first Bloomsday. At age 22 I had a strong sense of priorities, so I skipped my college graduation in order to wake up early in Dublin on June 16th, ready to trace the routes followed on that day in 1904 by the two protagonists created by James Joyce for his masterpiece, Ulysses.

The year was 1970, but the crowds of scholars I anticipated joining at various Joycean landmarks did not materialize. I wondered if I were the only Joyce enthusiast in Dublin who was celebrating Bloomsday, named in honor of the book’s main character, Leopold Bloom, whose peregrinations, along with those of Stephen Dedalus, are described in the 1922 novel.

Looking back, I would have been safe on that deserted Dublin day from coronavirus, had it then existed. The empty streets of 1970 will be replicated for this year’s Bloomsday, but this time out of necessity rather than neglect. Although there undoubtedly will be more Bloomsday celebrants than in 1970, they will not be strolling, but confined to the Hollywood-Squares-style boxes of Zoom meetings.

According to what I have read, Dublin didn’t officially start honoring Joyce and his literary achievements until the centennial of his birth, in 1982. Resentments lingered over Joyce’s sometimes uncharitable depiction of Dublin and Dubliners, not to mention embarrassment from 1930s obscenity trials in both the US and UK over the novel’s content.

In 1982, however, a slew of international Joyce scholars picked Bloomsday in Dublin for

James Joyce Statue

the date and site of their symposium.  The city, at last deciding to let bygones be bygones, rolled out the red carpet. Dublin never looked back. In 1990 the city even erected a bronze statue of the author holding his walking stick. Ever irreverent, Dubliners dubbed the statue “the prick with a stick.”

In 1996, the James Joyce Centre was established in a 1784 townhouse just down the street from Joyce’s alma mater, Belvedere College. On Bloomsdays past the center has offered Joyceans a number of Ulysses-themed walking tours of Dublin. It also houses exhibits and artifacts, including the actual front door of No. 7 Eccles Street, the address Joyce chose for the fictional home of Leopold Bloom. In 1970 I viewed that exact same door in a pub, The Bailey, where it had been on display since 1967.

A more recent local tribute was in 2003 when the James Joyce Bridge was built across the River Liffey and dedicated on Bloomsday. Better a bridge than a “disappointed bridge,” the term Stephen Dedalus uses in the second chapter of Ulysses to describe a pier.

The first Bloomsday is thought to have occurred in 1924, the 20th anniversary of the day recounted in the novel. In a June 27 letter that year to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce makes mention of “a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June.”

Thirty years later, on the 50th anniversary, a small group of Dublin authors famously attempted to visit all the landmarks mentioned in Ulysses by horse-drawn carriage, the same transportation used by Leopold Bloom on his way to a funeral. Once the group of literati hit the aforementioned Bailey, however, the drinks flowed freely and the tour came to a sudden and sodden halt.

Reading Ulysses at the Rosenbach

Meanwhile, Bloomsday came to be an annual event in locations around the world. In 1992, for example, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia held its first Bloomsday event. The next year, the street on which it’s located was closed to vehicles for what became a tradition of beginning-to-end outdoor readings of Ulysses by local notables. The Rosenbach bears the distinction of housing the original hand-written manuscript of Ulysses.

Since 1994 there has even been a Bloomsday celebration in the Hungarian town of Szombathely. Why? Joyce described Leopold Bloom as the son of Rudolf Virag (which means bloom in Hungarian), a native of Szombathely. The town repaid the compliment by erecting a bronze statue of Joyce in time for the Bloomsday centennial, 2004.

But this year the celebrations will either take a year off or will bloom in a vast bouquet of Zoom meetings around the globe. In New York City, Symphony Space’s annual staged readings of Ulysses, Bloomsday on Broadway, will go on. Since the event’s beginnings in 1981, this will be the first Virtual Bloomsday on Broadway, and will be shown on YouTube.  Stephen Colbert kicks off the event at 8 a.m. (the time at which events of Ulysses are launched) with a reading of Telemachus, or Chapter One.

Similarly, there will be (mostly free) online events at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre, at the Rosenbach Museum, at the University of Buffalo (which boasts the largest Joyce collection in the world), at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute and in many locations around the world.

My dream for Bloomsday 2020 was to recreate my visit to Dublin of 50 years ago and then

Joyce with Sylvia Beach in Paris, Shakespeare & Co.

to embark on a true Joyce journey across Europe, visiting again the places where Joyce lived and wrote: Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Obviously, I’m now prevented by a pandemic from carrying out my plan.

But in a sense, the online activities I have lined up for June 16th will allow me to out-Bloom Bloom. He spent that day going from place to place, all within the confines of the city. I will spend the day traveling the world, dropping in on one Bloomsday celebration after another, soaking up the festivities, all within the confines of my computer. Who wouldn’t say “Yes” to that?

Interviewing Ursula Le Guin

January 29, 2018 books, personalities, writing One comment

The death of Ursula Le Guin on January 22 made me sad over our loss of the doyenne of Portland writers, but also put me in a nostalgic mood for the day in 1991 that I interviewed her for a People magazine profile. My story ran on November 18 of that year.

She invited me to her home on Northwest Thurman Street, where we sat outside and talked about her childhood. Raised by anthropologists who were particularly interested in nearly extinct Native American tribes, Ursula remembered a home that was full of activity from her three brothers and from a constant stream of Indians, one of whom, Ishi, was the subject of her mother’s famous book, Ishi in Two Worlds.

She showed me where she usually sat to write, on her porch overlooking the Willamette River. She wrote longhand on tablets and later entered her writing onto her computer in her office, which was on the top floor of the sprawling house.

As we parted, I asked if there was someone from whom she would like me to request a quote. She answered, “Joyce Carol Oates.” I gulped, said, “No problem,” and later panicked. I had no idea how to reach her. Fortunately, at the same time that I was a People correspondent, I was also a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s Leisure & Arts Page. I called my editor there, Ray Sokolov.

No problem, he said. He and Joyce were currently both on a Pulitzer Prize judging panel and he could give me her home number. “Don’t tell her where you got the number,” he said.

Later I called Ursula to tell her how enthusiastic Ms. Oates had been about her. She was very pleased, but confessed, “I haven’t read a single thing by her!” As an afterthought, she said, “Don’t tell anybody!”

Shortly before the article was to be published, I got a frantic call from a People magazine copy editor. The photographer hadn’t provided much information about where he had photographed Ursula, and they were wondering the name of the “huge mountain” Ursula was sitting near. I knew that she had taken the photographer to her cabin at Cannon Beach, but nobody had said anything to me about going to the mountains for photos.

That was before the Internet, however, so the editor couldn’t share the photo with me electronically. I had to wait until the magazine hit the stands. I hurried to Rich’s Cigar Store, opened a copy and saw Ursula sitting in front of . . . Haystack Rock.

As Ursula would have said, with a sad shake of her head, “Those Easterners!”

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