My Writing Life

These are challenging times for writers. Celebrities who are already wildly successful in other areas – and I’m looking at you, Steve Martin, and even you, Rob Lowe – have already written books that are well-crafted, thoughtful and entertaining. And don’t even get me started about the book I read by first-time novelist Karen Thompson Walker. It was simply wonderful.

There’s no way that ordinary mortals can compete with this stuff. And I am – if nothing else – an extraordinarily ordinary man.

But even in the face of this cold reality… I am also a writer. I can’t help it. I write all the time.

Oh, I write as part of my job, but that’s only part of the story. The evidence?

• Exhibit A: I kept a daily diary about my family life from the day my oldest daughter was born, until the day my youngest graduated from college.
• Exhibit B: Cleaning out the garage, I stumbled upon journals that I had filled with words years before they were born — and that I had forgotten about.
• Exhibit C: College friends can tell you horror stories about my single-spaced, multi-page typewritten letters that I used to produce – and sometimes mail, sometimes not – in the dark time before everyone used computers.
• Exhibit D: This blog, in all its meandering glory, including all my poetry posts.
• Exhibit E: “My Life of Crime,” a novel I wrote more than two dozen years ago. (Where, as in “Home Alone,” the mere presence of a cell phone would have ruined the plot.)

My unpublished novel is a love story set in New York and New Jersey. The initial version was a tad meandering – footnoted, no less, with stories within the footnotes… as if I were Nabokov instead of Van Book (the manuscript’s anagrammatical and exceedingly less talented evil twin).

I revised “My Life of Crime” for my younger daughter for her 18th birthday more than a decade ago. It still has mighty literary pretensions. Note how (with a nod to Jerry Maguire) its virtual cover resembles the Bantam edition of “The Catcher in the Rye” – except in reverse and as if on a legal pad. But I have no illusions about the book’s sales potential. It's guaranteed never to have gone in or out of style; it’s just something I did for love.

If anyone out there wants a copy – and I’m assuming that only a friend would venture onto this page and read this far – please email me at bvar@verizon.net. I’ll send you a version in the format of your choice.

Also, on the last day of 2017, I posted here what I would consider a condensed version of the book as a short story, "A Triptych for Virginia."

And, lately, as you can tell from posts on this blog over the past three years, my writing has been focused on poetry. No longer working full-time, I've found friendship and acceptance in the poetry community in and around New Jersey. Here's a representative post, about my first reading as a "featured poet" in 2026.