Origin story

Fourteen years ago, inspired by blogs that had helped me through a bout of illness, I started writing a blog called Under the Stinkwood Tree. I lived in the Bowery then, in an artist’s loft that had a deck shaded by an ailanthus tree—a.k.a. stinkwood, because its blossoms smell like cat urine. Then a few years ago, after our kids had fledged, my partner and I moved north, to the Upper West Side, and into an apartment overlooking a locust tree. And I began a new volume, Days of the Locust. Sadly, the namesake tree died over a year ago, and although there was once hope that the city would replace it, that seems unlikely now, as New York faces more urgent concerns. So, welcome to my third volume, Up the River, named for beautiful Riverside Park, and for the mighty gray Hudson that forms its western margin, and for the haplessness of the humans who pace its paths.




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