I’ve just spent a week, more or less, doing what is for me the hardest part of writing: starting. I’m working on a new book for teens (will say more about what it is soon), and need to have it done in a few weeks. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is...
One summer, when I was a kid (maybe seven, or eight) I read Fred Gipson’s 1956 classic Old Yeller. I hadn’t seen the movie version. (Come to think of it, I never did see it.) When I got to the end, when Travis Coates has to shoot his beloved dog, I cried and cried....
“Musician, mentor, friend.” That was the headline of a story in the Nov. 14 edition of the Rochester, NY Democrat & Chronicle. The story continued: “Noted as a scholar and a gentleman . . . the late Alfred Mann is credited with bringing attention to early music....
In his magnum opus, the Dark Tower heptology, Stephen King writes a foreword to the last several volumes entitled simply, “On Being Nineteen,” and the number 19 shows up as an idée fixe throughout the series. I remember 19 very well: it is a potent threshold, a time...
(Thoughts on the eve of the Alfred Mann Music Festival) When I was nineteen, I was offered a position as composition instructor at a university. To my dad, a musicologist and college professor, this must have seemed a dream come true. What more wonderful career...
For years I have believed that the most empowering thing one can do is to freely declare, “I was wrong.” I believe this is one of those acts that can elevate one’s character and ennoble one’s life as almost nothing else can. Why is it that we so ardently cling to...
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