In the years that I lived in Naples, one of the most beautiful scenes took place on Thursday nights in the summer. Imagine. It’s perhaps 10 o’clock, still warm, with a breeze from the Bay. The Castel Nuovo (the “new…
Blog Archives
The four nights of meatloaf
My mother grew up in the Depression on a small farm on a plot of land now absorbed into Houston. She was by long habit frugal with family food and given to meticulous planning, even if my father’s income no…
Writing from a small city
Not quite the NYT Bestseller list, but When We Were Strangers made the list at Knoxville’s Union Avenue Books, our local and very fine independent. Here’s the list, FYI: Celebrating Our Favorite Local Authors and Special Friends Who Ranked Among…
Dangers of devouring books
If you read this blog, probably you were an eager reader of books as a child. Perhaps you even “devoured” them. I came upon this 1835 article from the American Annals of Education and quote in full, so that you may…
Dangers of Italian wind
It always struck me as strange that for a coastal city, wind was considered such a mortal risk in Naples. I’m not talking about howling winds, tornado winds or hurricane winds. I mean breezes that might just flutter summer leaves.…
Italian at the train station
Aside from native born Americans and some tribal peoples, most of the world is bilingual. I studied a few languages at school in a desultory way, but it wasn’t until 1990 when I moved to Italy that fluency took on…
Soldier coming home
The happy news of the end of the Iraq War reminds me of a scene a few summers ago at the Knoxville airport. I was coming to pick up Maurizio, parked in the short term lot and followed a pretty…
What was cooking in 1900?
What was on the table in the early 1900s? And what about way before that? I found a great timeline of food history. Here is an excerpt from the era of my novel, 1900-1911: cook books, PB&J, and the rise…
The “new land” revision exercise
This week I gave a workshop on revision for the Knoxville chapter of Friends of Literacy. Here’s one of our exercises. Often in fiction (or non-fiction) characters enter a “new land,” sometimes literally, but often simply a radically new situation.…
Women’s work, 1911
Around 1911, the period of my novel in progress, women in factories generally earned 50-60% of men’s salaries. More than a century later, we are at 77% in factory and non-factory careers. Not much progress. Employers then often paid half…
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