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“Eating the Sea”
There’s no way to write about Montauk without writing about fish and shellfish. Any beach walk brings treasures like clam, scallop, mussel and oyster shells, the strong tang of dried seaweed, the sight of boats in the distance and fisherman along the shore. Fishing and shellfishing are the heart of the place. The Eastern End…
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Alexis Rockman’s Art: An Environmental Call to Action
Alexis Rockman’s art is fascinating. I love how his paintings look—vivid, colorful, eye-popping. They are not only gorgeous visually, but also serve as a call to action. For instance, his recent “The Great Lakes Cycle,” have been described as “natural-history psychedelia” https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/alexis_rockman.html. This recent series explores the geographical, physical, and ecological changes of the Great Lakes…
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Heroes of the Frontier, a novel by Dave Eggers
Heroes of the Frontier, by Dave Eggers, is deeply philosophical, deeply felt, and deeply funny. The novel centers on a woman who escapes to Alaska with her two children and makes her way across the state in a beat-up rented recreational vehicle they call the Chateau. If you’ve ever gone camping, you’ll adore all the…
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Orient, a novel by Christopher Bollen
Orient, a novel by Christopher Bollen, is truly atmospheric, a literary work in the guise of a thriller, that kept me completely riveted https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062329950/orient/. The novel is set on Long Island, the rural tip of the North Fork in the hamlet of Orient. It’s an area I know, though nothing as well as I’d like,…
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Stowe Landscape Garden, Buckinghamshire, England
I’ve always been in love with gardens. I grew up in what were called garden apartments, in a complex called Glen Oaks, in the area of Queens known as Kew Gardens. But although there were oaks, there were no glens and no gardens to be seen. I loved trees, plants, and flowers from an early…
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The Curious Hoodoos of Montauk’s Shadmoor Cliffs
In my current novel set in Montauk, I’ve taken my characters outdoors on some of my favorite walks and hikes in the area. One of these is a popular hike along the ocean cliffs of Shadmoor. The Shadmoor property, nearly 100 acres of Montauk moorland, is unique both for its cliffs, which form something called hoodoos,…
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Jane Austen’s Bath, England
The formal and elegant city of Bath is an exquisite example of a planned city. If “city” and “jumbled” go together for you, a city as harmonious as Bath will take a bit of getting used to. Built along the Avon river and its gentle slopes, white and cream buildings form grand avenues and crescents beyond the town…
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Meditation Upon a Frozen River
Is nature so important to us because it’s the ultimate creative force? In my writing and in my life, setting, and being out of doors, is important to me. I find that experiencing nature directly – feeling the sharp prick of a thorn, hearing the soft whoosh of a plop of snow, recoiling from the scent…
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Historic Lamb House, Home of Henry James, in Rye, East Sussex
Many artists and writers find inspiration in landscape or in the built environments of cities and towns. What attracts a writer to a given location? A drawing of a house is what drew author Henry James (1843-1916), an American who lived in Britain, to the the historic seaport town of Rye, in East Sussex, England. Enchanted…
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New York’s South Street Seaport
It’s hard to think of bustling, spire-jammed Manhattan as an island, with miles of river frontage. For centuries, the waterfront was meant for work, not pleasure. But in the last several decades that’s changed, and redevelopment is occuring all along the coasts, notably Battery Park and more recently, Hudson Yards. The South Street Seaport waterfront…
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