Silence, maybe. Space to write. A quiet column of time in which to give audience to all that’s in one’s head. That might be what a writer wants. But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find […]
Read more
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. I started in earnest on a new book today. It wasn’t one I’ve been meaning to write. For some time now, the list of what I’ve been meaning […]
Read more
This is the picture window in our breakfast room. It hasn’t always looked like this. I don’t think we wrote on it–ever–until Emma was home-schooled in the 7th grade. That’s when she helped me see that this window would make an excellent substitute for a white board. And so, throughout her three years of home-school, […]
Read moreToday I hoped to accomplish a small handful of things which included, but was not limited to all the laundry walking the dog making soup for dinner writing a blog post I think anyone would agree this is a very small handful of things. It is not even a real handful, I think– which also […]
Read more
My family and I attended a play last night: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at PlayMakers Theater. It’s difficult to say that this is a wonderful play, or even, perhaps, a good one. You don’t witness a drama about false accusations, terrible lies, and gross injustice and feel good about it afterward. Which isn’t to say that the play doesn’t resolve. It certainly resolves–but […]
Read more
It feels like only weeks ago I was sitting at my little table in the public library. Biography section on the left, self-help on the right, and me at my table in the middle because here was a bright space with a window. I sat there almost every Monday morning for a span of three […]
Read more
My mother told me, “Books are your friends.” What was I doing? Standing on some, maybe. Or I had thrown one across the room? Maybe I’d written in one: our old family copy of Charlotte’s Web, which I somehow managed to take with me when I left my parents’ house, and which I read to our children […]
Read more
When I was their age, writers themselves did not exist beyond the stories I read. Stories and books simply were–like my parents, like trees, like breathing.
Read moreThis much was clear about Dr. Donnelly: he liked Interesting–and from what he said, he apparently found it difficult to come by.
Read moreI have this thing I do when deciding about a book. Do you do this too? Whether standing in the bookstore or the library stacks, at a rotating book rack in the airport or, even, in front of a bookshelf in the home of a friend: I open the book at random and I read. […]
Read more