Blog

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The person with breast cancer is the perceived victim, and with good reason. Meet the Silent Victim But there is a silent victim: the support person, not always but more often than not a man. Feel especially for those young men who think toxic masculinity is the way to be a real man. My book, Your Partner Has Breast Cancer: 21 Ways to Keep Sane as a Support Person on Your Journey from Victim to Survivor, is for them. I wrote it while I was playing that role as support person for Emily and discovering that no resources were available anywhere to help me take care of myself so I could take care of her. What Others Are Saying I felt guilty thinking I […]

Two hundred descendants of immigrants met Saturday September 7 at the euphemistically named North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, to stand in solidarity with the estimated six hundred immigrants who have been illegally kidnapped by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Their crime: being born non-white and outside the United States. Witnesses came from as far away as Chicago. At least a dozen representatives from Ann Arbor were present. Your Tax Dollars at Work The event was sponsored by No Detention Centers in Michigan, a statewide coalition of immigrant-support groups that is working collectively to abolish immigration detention and migrant incarceration in Michigan and beyond. Baldwin is located within Manistee National Forest, three and a half hours from Ann Arbor. It is one of the most impoverished communities in […]

It’s been a long time in coming but today, July 14, is launch date for my memoir, Thumbs Up: Memoir of a Joyful Organizer. On behalf of my publisher, Azenphony Press, I invite you to celebrate with us at my book launch party. Third Mind Books, 118 E. Washington Street, in Ann Arbor, is playing host. Party begins at 7 p.m. I Offer My Beat Credentials This is my first time speaking at Third Mind Books. I’m especially honored because they specialize in literature of the Beats. To get the invitation, I had to prove my Beat credentials. How did I do that? Come to the book launch and find out my personal connections to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner, and other literary legends. As historian Harvey Wasserman notes […]

This post is about an historic union victory and the upcoming memoir that celebrates it. In 1992, a small, sinister no doubt, group of adjunct faculty members at Eastern Michigan University—known euphemistically as part-timers even though some taught up to eight classes a semester, on three campuses throughout southeast Michigan to make ends meet—came together and made a vow: that they would create one bargaining unit for all adjunct faculty members, both part-timers and full-timers. It was a gutsy move. In all of Michigan history, no such bargaining unit—for adjunct faculty exclusively—had ever existed. In addition, they faced a hostile administration. By the end of that first meeting, they had formed themselves into EMULOC: Eastern Michigan University Lecturers Organizing Committee (later Congress). They began their first card campaign the next […]

Susan Brownmiller, legendary feminist author and pioneer leader of the second wave of the feminist movement, died Saturday May 24, 2025. Susan was best known as the author of the groundbreaking book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, the book that put rape on the map as a feminist issue. It was my honor to have her in my life for one brief but significant, for me, moment. Here’s what happened: I Give in to Groupie Tendencies I was sitting at my desk at the publishing house where I was working by day when the voice over the intercom announced that I had a call on line 3. I was at the time at a low point in my life. The entire inventory of my Voices from the Underground […]