A blog about New York City, my books, and my cats. Mostly.
Today I picked up the book All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. I loved the PBS series, (can’t wait for it to return) so I thought the book would be equally comforting. There have been worse times in history to live through, I will get through this. But I will follow the advice given by my choir director, and reach out to the people who are going to be hurt the most.
The first review of my book, The Killing Fields of East New York, from Booklist! Thank you, Booklist!
“East New York was once a thriving community made up of immigrants and middle-income families … By the 1990s, hundreds in that area were murdered annually, and it was dubbed “the killing fields of New York.” This book details just how East New York became that way, and it’s not what you would expect. Horn (Damnation Island, 2018) presents a thoroughly researched narrative… Her investigation uses numerous resources including extensive interviews. Readers will be drawn into the conversational style that places them in a world that illustrates just what happens when money and power fall into the wrong hands.” —Booklist
East New York in 1857.
It’s that time of year! We’re doing a lot of great pieces, but I have to point out this one piece, an arrangement of Adeste Fidelis (aka O Come All Ye Faithful) by the late, great Alice Parker. It’s glorious, gives me chills, it’s like I never really heard it until she arranged it. It made me cry the first time we sang it.
Who sang it better?
The Atlanta Symphony Chorus (conducted by Robert Shaw, who collaborated with Alice Parker)?
Or us, The Choral Society of Grace Church?
For a complete list of what we’re singing and a link to buy tickets, click here.
While recently going through my old photographs I came across this picture of me at 18. I’d always loved taking pictures, but during my first year of college I took a required photography course and started using a better camera.
It was one of the most fun and exciting turns in my life. Even though I wanted to be a writer since I was nine, making a living writing didn’t seem like the most practical idea so I decided I would make a living as a photographer instead, while still pursing my dream of writing books. That plan didn’t go so well, alas, but I stumbled into something that ultimately led to Echo, a social network I started in 1989. My first book was published in 1998, when I was 42.
I remember telling my therapist, when I was around 30-years old, that if I didn’t publish by the time I was 40 there was no point to keep trying. After 40 I’d be too old to enjoy it. Hahaha. I remember seriously thinking that!! Hang in there dreamers!
This is me at 18, in my college dorm room, with my beloved Pentax SP-1000.
I was watching a YouTube video about Montauk, on Long Island, (I love this guy’s videos, Peter Santenello) and they mentioned haul seiners, which is a kind of fisherman who practices a certain method of fishing. They said haul seining had slowly been outlawed. And it made me feel nostalgic, the whole video made me feel nostalgic because Montauk, when I knew it, was pretty much the last refuge for middle and low income people out east on Long Island, and eventually they will be pushed out of there too one day. (I grew up on Long Island, in the 1960s and 1970s.)
There’s this slight hill between Montauk and the Hamptons and my friends used to joke how people in Montauk would rarely go over that hill into the Hamptons, and they preferred it on their side of the hill. I was not a poor fisherman, but I identified with them more than the glitterati (a group I very definitely did not belong in either).
Anyway, I spent one summer in Amagansett in the 1970s, and I was coming home from work as a cocktail waitress when I decided to drive to the beach and watch the sun come up before going home to bed. A bunch of haul seiners were there setting up their nets and I took pictures of them. (My camera went with me everywhere in those days.) Amazingly, I went digging for the negatives and found them! Here are two shots from that batch.
