• “The Year of the Dog” Movie: Power of Trust and Love

    The Year of the Dog movie, about an amazing stray dog Husky and a recovering addict, is now available online.

  • The Color of Cancer: Time for a Change

    Black lifespans in NYC are 7 years shorter than white are, and many are cut short by cancer. Policy could change that.

  • Audiobook release of Mosquito Song: Dreams in Old San Juan

    My new short fiction audiobook is out now and free US review copies are available in a limited number.

  • Love of the Irish: St. Patrick’s Day Reflections

    A Personal St. Patrick’s Day Planning Cycle St. Patrick’s Day Plan 1. The most obvious plan is to drink. I am part Irish according to ancestry.com, a lot of people in the town (hamlet, really) where I grew up in were Irish, including my first boyfriend. And I always have a Guinness on St. Patrick’s…

  • How Not to Die of Lung Cancer

    Quitting smoking is only part of the solution. The day we found out my father had lung cancer, a neighbor had come by my childhood home upstate, but no one answered the door. The neighbor went on inside and looked around – none of us locked our doors out there in the country at the…

  • Good Neighbors

    A Christmas Story, excerpt from Death and the Dream. After Christmas my Aunt Muriel and I walk through the barren park on East Fifth Street in New York. It’s not much of a park. We have to stop every six feet or so beside one of the rotting wooden benches to let my Aunt Muriel…

  • Stream and Shale

    (Excerpt from my book, Stream and Shale.) 6AM. At the journey’s beginning, stars still shine brightly in the dark blue sky. It’s below freezing. We gather on a Brooklyn street corner and wait for the bus going to a Citizens Tour of Pennsylvania arranged by Brooklyn for Peace. Each person carries a few gallons of…

  • My Mother, My Daughters, and Breast Cancer

    Genes cause cancer. But genes do not necessarily cause death from cancer. Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time of both hope and remembrance for me. Hope for a better future, and remembrance for my Mother. She died suddenly of metastatic breast cancer at about the time I was going to deliver my second baby daughter.…

  • About that vaccine…

    I got my second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in New York City on Saturday, an emotional experience. It was at one of the NYC vaccine hubs called PODs, set up by the Health Department. I had been working for 12 hour shifts once a week to help get New Yorkers vaccinated. The PODs…

  • Veterans and my novel, Brindle 24

    Norman Brown, the author’s father was a veteran of WW2.