The Soul Mate Expeditions

The Soul Mate Expeditions is a collection of stories (including one novella) and letters to the editor of The East Hampton Star written over a period of 20 years by author Lyle Greenfield. They range in emotional and intellectual substance from the truly romantic to the utterly fantastical...from grippingly dramatic to the hilariously absurd. And somewhere within it all is an examination of the intangible things that rule our hearts in the quest for love... and sometimes simply cause us to fly off the rails.

• Have you ever put up 100 posters on a busy city street trying to contact the woman whose phone number you'd lost? • Have you ever buried a beloved friend in the sand dunes near the Atlantic Ocean, fulfilling a request in his Last Will? • Have you ever had an experimental microchip implanted in your brain for the purpose of capturing moving images of your actual dreams? • Have you ever visited the Social Security offices in New York City and had your age changed? • Have you ever been trapped in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel for over an hour, desperately needing to urinate? • Have you ever wondered what souls actually look like? The Soul Mate Expeditions is a collection of stories (including one novella) and letters to the editor of The East Hampton Star written over a period of 20 years by author Lyle Greenfield. They range in emotional and intellectual substance from the truly romantic to the utterly fantastical... from grippingly dramatic to the hilariously absurd. And somewhere within it all is an examination of the intangible things that rule our hearts in the quest for love...and sometimes simply cause us to fly off the rails. Greenfield's unmistakable "voice" will remain with you long after you've turned the last page and said, out loud, to no one, "What?"

Lyle Greenfield was born in Rochester, New York where he was raised Catholic and attended St. Margaret Mary grade school. He went to Confession every two weeks and each time confessed the same sins. Lyle received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Bowling Green University. He wrote a weekly humor column for the student newspaper and syndicated it to fifteen other college papers. (His heroes were the columnists Art Buchwald and Russell Baker.) He began his career in New York City as a copywriter for the ad agency J. Walter Thompson, later moving to Saatchi as creative director on the Jeep account. In 1980 Lyle purchased a low-lying plot of farmland in Bridgehampton, Long Island and planted a vineyard. He then built The Bridgehampton Winery, the first winery in the Hamptons, but after a 15-year battle between climate and site, the vineyard failed; not, however, before its winemaker, Richard Olsen-Harbich, had won over 100 awards for the wines in National and International competitions. (The winery closed in 1995 and is now home of the South Fork Natural History Museum.) In 1989, Lyle started Bang Music in New York, a company that today provides original music and audio services across all broadcast media. He is a founding member and former president of the Association of Music Producers (AMP) and co-creator of the AMP Awards for Music and Sound. Lyle is a frequent contributor to the ad and entertainment industry magazine SHOOT, writing about music and popular culture. He is also a somewhat notorious writer of letters to The East Hampton Star, a selection of which appears in this volume. He resides with his wife, Mary Jane Hantz Greenfield, in Amagansett and New York City.