Welcome New Followers!

I’m still on break, catching up on new books like Pax by the amazing historian of Ancient Rome Tom Holland whose insights, and prose are sometimes stunning. Also rereading favorites like Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Revolution: A New History, which reverses standard interpretations.

That period has always interested me because my maternal grandfather was in the first Kerensky government and fled the Bolsheviks with his wife and his infant daughter, my mom. Both authors are terrific story tellers and I fell in love with stories when my mother read The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland to me.

While I’m off, here’s a link to one of the very first new essays I started publishing during and after the pandemic, a time that became surprisingly prolific for me. It’s as the Anglo-Saxon poets said: I opened my word hoard. If you’ve ever had a migraine, known someone who has, or never quite understood what migraines can be like, you might enjoy it:

https://www.recoveringself.com/health/me-and-my-migraines

You can also find dozens more of my published essays—including reprints—at my author website. My subjects include travel, family, art, neurodivergence, travel, museums, writing and publishing—and even my beard:

https://www.levraphael.com/essays.html

(Image by K Wol from Pixabay)

P.S.—subscription is now and always will be free. It’s what I offer the writing community after years of teaching, editing, mentoring and coaching. And as Google explains, “On Substack, following a creator allows you to see their notes and reading activity (like likes) in your feed. It doesn't automatically subscribe you to their publication or include you on their email list. Subscribing, on the other hand, gets you their posts via email and/or the Substack app, and automatically follows you.”