Robinson’s Way

In the Brittany seaside town I visited in July, situated in the northernmost region of Finistère (literally, land’s end), there comes to pass a somewhat enchanted event my host calls the pêche miraculeuse (or miraculous [...]

I was studying for a three-hour French exam, scheduled the next day, while getting ready for bed when I heard a neighbor pass by our rural Normandy house. I wasn't the only one to hear [...]

Although I’ve probably been to the United States close to twenty times, if not more, and though I'm a U.S. citizen, I can’t profess to ever having lived there for more than six months at [...]

If you’re as incurably literary a person as I am, any library in proximity is a beautiful haven. There are many such havens in my area, but the New York Public Library is one that [...]

This column, truthfully, is a love letter to writing. It comes after after a bout with creative infertility that lasted at least a month. As in most love letters, this one is confused, more garbled [...]

The first time I heard the late English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, I thought he was Welsh because of the inflexions that peppered his melodic singing voice. This, as I later found out, came from his [...]

Some things leave a mark. This school year did. Its awkward summer break came after a (pointless) return to school that followed a four-month confinement. My life during this period was a carefully-stitched amalgam of [...]

For as long as I can remember, the Thursday morning farmer's market has been a weekly institution, a hive that brings vitality to an otherwise gray day (and there are many) in the town of [...]

I was in a phone conversation with my father in the United States when I learned of the May 25 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Something reverberated within [...]

Not long ago, a poet friend asked me to write the afterword for his most recent collection, titled "Think of All the Beauty Still Left." The title paraphrases a quote from Anne Frank’s diary, and, [...]

Chatting with my editor and mentor not long ago we came to the obvious subject: Europe's present state of anti-viral confinement. We stated the obvious — that life in both our environments had all but [...]