I am a journalist, novelist and poet who lives in Northampton, MA. I covered technology from 1983 to 2017, concentrating on computer technology. My university training was a BA in creative writing from University of Michigan and I also studied electronic engineering at Northeastern University and biology at Harvard University.
I’ve been focusing on the climate crisis in my fiction, writing 2018’s Replay Earth and the soon to be published The Turn. My view is that the climate crisis is not a crisis of technology, but of politics, money and public will. If the climate crisis kills of humanity, it won’t be from the weather, but from the wars and other violence that such massive disruption could cause.
So I’ve chosen to focus on empathy and its role in how we respond to the crisis. When I started writing Replay in 2015, that was still something of an abstraction. But the campaign against immigrants has highlighted what I’ve been writing about: we will soon have hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of climate refuges from both inside our country and from the rest of the world. If we don’t develop the mentality and means to treat that as a crisis we all need to address and not an excuse for bigotry, we will be dooming ourselves to a future of endless violence and decline.
Apart from my climate work, I have also been writing about immigration itself. I’m working on an epic poem that details the long, hard journey by father’s family took around 1920 from czarist Russia to New York, escaping pogroms and poverty.
My other great passions are woodworking and music, specifically jazz and blues. You can find my writing on that in the Music section of this site.
I’ve been blessed to be with Julie Wittes Schlack since we met in a writing class in 1972. We have two adult daughters and two granddaughters. And let us not forget Billie, our smart, quirky, goofy minibernedoodle, who patrols the area around our Northampton home, making sure that no squirrels or rabbits steal our food.