A sense of community and threats to community were the twin themes of Blei's writing, whether he is writing about urban Chicago or rural Wisconsin: "Norb specializes in the fleeting look at the little people of the city, the aged newsstand operators, the small restaurant owners, Greek, Bohemian, Slovak, who still provide, in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, national dishes and national atmosphere.

And he is determined to get these glimpses of a disappearing Chicago on paper before they are ploughed under to make way for new high-rise apartments, or succumb to the creeping wave of debris, human and material, so characteristic of most large cities these days."

(David Pichaske, 2000) In the early 1990s, Blei started Cross+Roads Press to offer established and beginning writers an opportunity to be published in chapbook form.

For over 30 years, Blei was writer-in-residence at The Clearing, a folk arts school founded in 1935 by landscape architect Jens Jensen.

Blei collaborated with the pseudonymous Monsieur K, located in France, who created an assortment of web sites for posting writings artists judged to abide by the spirit of "free jazz".

Blei suggests that county officials freeze all building, property sales, and residential, commercial and public planning in the County; turn the entire County over to Nature Conservancy; close the new bridge at Sturgeon Bay and make an outdoor walking mall of it, with artsy-craftsy shops, a Ferris wheel, and Chicago style food vendors; admit tourists freely across the old bridge May through October, subject to a tax of $50 per vehicle per week and $25 per person per day, but from November through April by visa only; tear up all highways and back roads and return them to their natural state of dirt, gravel, good Door County earth; place a moratorium on new road construction in the County; encourage vandalism of commercial signs while instituting a $3,000 fine for anyone caught erecting new advertisements or newspaper mail boxes; tear up 'ugly metal road signs' and either replace them with wooden ones or leave the roads nameless.