It’s taken me a long time to call myself a writer. Even now, after almost nine months of writing basically full-time, I always hesitate. How does it work, you know? I mean, does the fact that I have a sprig of rhubarb planted in my herb garden make me a farmer? I don’t think so. […]
Read more“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction….” — Virginia Woolf A long, lazy drive to Charlottesville, taking nearly all back roads and finding myself (I recognized it before I read the sign) at the entrance to Somerset Farm. It wasn’t where I was going, but I headed up […]
Read moreEvery morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos […]
Read moreYou have been at work for some time when he gets home. It’s the sort of day that has found you in the work and then necessarily away from it and then back at it again, exhilarated and discouraged by turns. This is good work; this is bad; this is god-awful in a way that […]
Read more“Do not hurry; do not rest.” — Goethe Here’s news– or is it?: I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing […]
Read moreI’m mailing it in today. Despite the list of blog posts waiting in my little notebook, I am only making time to do this. There is simply Too Much Else to do. My children have the day off today. Which means, of course, that one of them has a friend over, and another is at […]
Read moreAlready it was five years ago– the most pressured-filled fall of my life. I was teaching full-time: humanities 9 and humanities 10, both of them curricula I had written. It was year 2 for the ninth grade, but only the first year for the tenth, which meant (as it always does, I think, when teaching […]
Read moreToday! Today is National Punctuation Day! I wouldn’t have known and hadn’t ever– before today– even heard of such a thing. But bing.com delivered to me this delightful news earlier this morning, and I just couldn’t let the day pass without a small celebration. Punctuation is Great. Really and truly Great. It’s fascinating in its […]
Read moreor “Mother,” Part II It shouldn’t be so hard. Really, on paper, it looks for all the world like it makes sense. Which isn’t to say that I’ve actually written it down. I haven’t actually recorded on paper my Plan For The Day. But I do have a Plan. I have a Plan that should […]
Read moreHere’s something delightful– and who doesn’t need delightful now and again? Reader (thank you so much, Tim) and high school chum Timothy Crouse reminded me of this: the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. It is a contest in which you– get this– compete to win the prize for the Worst First Sentence. I love this. It is […]
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