What if losing your voice means you found it?
I cannot stop the famous Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’ from constantly running through my head. I, like many others, had no idea things were about to go sideways so quickly after last November's election...Well, part of me did, my gut. It knew the day after and one of the things it devoured was my ability to write. Imagine waking up morning after morning and as soon as your brain kicks it, it shrugs and says, “why bother?” I’m not talking writer’s block. This was more like the old joke about the light at the end of the tunnel being a gasoline tanker driven by drunken monkeys, all flicking disposable lighters. I’ve been writing books, essays, newspaper columns, and short stories for close to forty years, with, for lack of a better description, a sliding style. Think academic when I wrote regularly for Behavioral and Social Sciences Journal , political for things like my weekly column “Right-Minded, But Left of Center,” nature-oriented when I contributed re...