Blog Archives

Ambitions of a Protestant Saint

At age 9, I decided to be the first Protestant saint, which would catapult me into a new edition of A Child’s History of Heroes and Heroines. I knew this was a stretch. My Sunday school teachers had been quite

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Posted in imaginative child, Just life

On glimpsing darkness and light

When our granddaughter Silvia was nearly four, we were stopped in traffic near the local military cemetery, row on row of tombstones. “What are those white things?” she asked. I said they marked where soldiers were buried. “All those are

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Posted in Just life

When lies make you sputter

In the current super-heated medical-political world you hear lies that make you sputter. How can an apparently thinking person voice such thoughts? Doesn’t this nonsense stick coming out of the throat? Answering with facts just doesn’t matter. All those years

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Posted in Just life, WWWS

Louis Braille’s pocket ego

The summer I was nine, I lived mostly on biographies. I’d ride my bike to the Westfield, NJ public library and laboriously pick out the four books I was allowed. The Signature series featured a medallion with the Famous Person’s

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Posted in Just life

Wonder under the street

              A plain summer day when I was seven stretched out for my girlfriends and me. We were walking along Dorian Road in Metuchen, looking for adventure. Suddenly, there it was, like the mythical gold on American streets. I’m talking

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Posted in Just life

Lost wallet, moonshot

Recently, I noticed my husband’s wallet on the cutting board in the kitchen. This was clearly a one-off for someone who pretty much never loses, misplaces or forgets anything. How very odd. But that event reminded me of another lost

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Posted in Just life, WWWS

Chemist looks for trouble

My father loved problems. He looked for them in a good way. He was an organic chemist, doing process research in pharmaceuticals for Merck. He worked on the Sinemet, for Parkinsons, which he later took himself, on some of the

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Posted in Just life, WWWS

Savior drives a Cadillac

Years ago, I was living in California and my father in New Jersey was diagnosed with advanced non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, likely to be fatal in four months. I flew home and my mother picked me up at Newark Airport. Befuddled and exhausted,

Posted in Cadillac, cancer remission, Just life, Newark, WWWS

’Twas the Night Before Christmas: Textual issues

I’m fine with flying reindeer delivering presents to every earthly child in one night. However, Mr. Clement C. Moore has imbedded some serious textual inconsistencies in “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The reindeer and sleigh are clearly diminutive: “miniature sleight

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Posted in Just life

Flipping on Anna Karenina

In the summer when I was sixteen, I read great gobs of Anna Karenina with my feet over my head. I had been somberly informed that you retain information better if there is more blood in your brain. This seemed

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Posted in Just life, Writing
Announcements

Sunday, May 6, 2pm reading from latest work at Hexagon Brewing Company, Knoxville, TN.

Thursday, May 10, 6-8 pm presentation on research on the historical novel, Blount County Library, Maryville, TN.

When We Were Strangers, Italian translation, to be presented in Pescasseroli, Italy, August 2018.

Recent Review
“Absorbing and layered with rich historical details, in Under the Same Blue Sky, Schoenewaldt weaves a tender and at times, heartbreaking story about German-Americans during World War I. With remarkable compassion, the author skillfully portrays conflicted loyalties, the search for belonging, the cruelty of war, and the resilience of the human spirit.”—Ann Weisgarber, author of The Promise and The Personal History of Rachel Dupree

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