by Katharine Ogden Michaels | May 10, 2022 | Uncategorized
I had known Lenny—obliquely—for nearly twenty years, since just after I had arrived in California from the East Coast to enter the English PH.D program at Berkeley, where he taught creative writing, Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Saint Augustine, Babel, Kafka, and...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | May 3, 2022 | Uncategorized
My first personal encounter with Barclay was at the Barclay Simpson Fine Arts Gallery in Lafayette, California sometime in mid 1981. Before that day, I had only seen him from a distance at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 26, 2022 | Uncategorized
I had first selected Rome as a strategic retreat out of a vague conviction that its classical facades and mysterious streets, alluring to me since childhood through books and stories, would fill the hole dug inside of me by failed love. And, indeed, the actual...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 20, 2022 | Uncategorized
On December 2nd of that year, I was waiting for Leonard Michaels, noted fiction writer, to emerge from the baggage claim area of the Rome, Italy airport. He had just landed from San Francisco. I saw him from afar before he saw me. I didn’t leap up to reassure him, but...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 1, 2022 | Uncategorized
To understand Barclay (Barc) Simpson—founder and prime mover of the Simpson Manufacturing Company– one must first understand his core product. Stripped down to its essence, the Simpson Strong-Tie (also known as a connector) is a piece of bent metal joinery that...
