My grandmother was loving, kind and self-sacrificing. Margaret, my grandfather’s lady friend with whom he took up after my grandmother’s death, was none of that. Margaret did have lovely skin, as she often pointed out. She was from New Orleans,…
Blog Archives
Knoxville Easy-Thread Needle Conspiracy
If you ever sew, even an occasional button, and have less than 20-20 vision, you want these needles. Instead of poking blindly, increasingly convinced that a company of rich men, a dozen Rupert Murdocks, could enter the Kingdom of Heaven…
Writing, barking, shouting
There’s a German Shepherd in the neighborhood who likes to bark in the afternoons. Since this was meant to be a writing afternoon, I’ve been tense. Barking isn’t an intrinsically soothing sound and I prefer silence for writing rather than,…
Why women shouldn’t vote
I’ve been researching the women’s suffrage movement and came upon these illuminating pamphlets on why voting is not good for women and also doesn’t remove spots on clothing as easily as you’d like. Food for thought.
Posted in WWWS
What makes clams happy?
Granted this is a fairly trivial topic, but ask an anxious writer how many ways there are to lose time while fretting over a passage and you’ll get a lot of interesting answers. So I was walking Jesse the dog…
Writing can be write fun
Deep into the seriousness of preparing my manuscript for HarperCollins, I had the great experience of Brent Thompson’s Write Nite in the upper room of Knoxville’s Preservation Pub. It was fun, with edge and beer, very Cheers-like, a little rap,…
The boarding house reach
Both my first novel, When We Were Strangers, and my current one (coming in September, 2013), put the main character for some time in boarding houses in the years between 1880 and 1911. So I did some research and find…
Dickens & Little Red Riding Hood
The New York Public Library has an exhibit on characters of Charles Dickens, including illustrations, notes, merchandising (he was very into this) and some astonishing quotes. Like this one: “If I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should…
The terror of Sherwin-Williams
My office at work is being painted. The paint brand is Sherwin-Williams and suddenly I am thrown back to me at age perhaps six, just able to read. A hardware store on Main Street in Metuchen, N.J. has a sign…
Communion, with squirrel
Taking communion today, I flashed back to a conversation with a guard in a museum in Spoleto, in the center of Umbria, the green heart of Italy. It involved squirrels and happened like this. I was in a writing program…
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