Blog Archive

I wrote this in the early 2000s, based on some notes I took in the 1990s, when I would ride the train from Boston to Haverhill. The station is obviously North Station, but before the renovations. I haven't been there in decades. The renovations have probably been renovated. Anyway, you can clearly tell that I wrote this under the sway of Joseph Mitchell and Malcolm Lowry, stylistically anyway.

[This was my last column for the Observant, the newspaper at Maastricht University, where I've written four pieces a year for four years] Endings … That idea that came to me in 2017–the idea that more should be known about language at the end of life, and that language at the beginning of life might shed light on it–became several pieces of journalism and academic articles…

A short story whose time to be shared has come. To be part of something, as it were. Maybe. It's called "Misfit Lumber." Sound of sawing. Man’s shoes on floor. Light goes out. Workshop door closes. Pile of lumber comes to life. Odds and ends of boards. Scraps unused. Misfit lumber in the dark. The wood comes to life. What happened to Pat? they ask. What happened to that piece of pine?

Where does good writing come from? I admit, for a long time, I never gave this question much thought. I never needed to be motivated to write or told to strive to do it well, and I never thought about how other people did it. You might as well have asked me how I breathed.

Jasmine Bina, co-founder of a strategy think-tank, Concept Bureau, riffed on LinkedIn the other day about “grieftech.” … She wrote, It would be really great for a brand in this category to lead with a new thesis or belief of what death and grief are *supposed to mean to us today*. That could change everything. We're asking ourselves, but don't have an answer for that yet.

This is an expanded version of a column I wrote for the university newspaper, which gives me 350 words–enough to introduce an idea, not enough to develop it. The headline of the original post was “Vocabulary lesson: