I recently spent two weeks in Grand Teton National Park on a writing retreat.  I’d been there before, but this time I adopted a contrarian perspective.  My project became finding the most iconic views—and then looking away to truly see this marvelous place.  Then, the...

Last month, I served as the artist-in-residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice, Nebraska.  Having come to believe that constraints catalyze creativity, I chose the number 160 to shape my writing—the number of acres that a pioneer could claim under t...

          We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The Opera in Agadir, Morocco, at the 13t...

         I like gnomes.  The legendary, subterranean dwarfs are fine, but I mean the other sense of “gnome”—a pithy statement of general truth (gnō-, being the root of knowledge). The more common terms include aphorisms, maxims and apothegms, with a...

             I previously wrote about a collaborative project with Dr. Anne Guzzo—an acclaimed composer in the Department of Music—to produce a chamber opera (How Science OPERAtes).  We are excited to announce that LOCU...

          Back in the 1960s, my family watched Art Linkletter’s television show, which included a segment in which he asked children questions or vice-versa.  This format gave rise to a series of books titled, “Kids Say the Darnedest Things.”  The notion was that the s...

             Few people grasp the complexities of science and still fewer engage the richness of opera—so why not combine the two?!  This seems absurd, but the venture is also ridiculously intriguing.  I team...

One of the challenges of being a writer is having too many interesting projects and not enough time.  This is hardly the grounds for pity.  Nobody feels sorry for the kid in a candy shop with a five dollar bill.  And while I have a non-fiction project in the works (Beh...