My very first semester in college, I was offered an internship at a daily newspaper. I turned it down, rather piously as I recall. I was majoring in English, not journalism. I was going to be a fiction writer. Why would I want to write daily news? Ironically, ten or so years after turning down […]
On Reading Challenges
On her Facebook page, author Ania Ahlborn confessed feeling baffled by people who read more than a dozen books a month. (Did you notice the name drop? Yeah, I don’t know her IRL, though.) Her “confusion” stems only partly from the mere fact of time and how does anyone have that much. Mostly, she wonders […]
Does This Book Spark Joy?
At about 2 a.m., my life partner, Tim, smelled smoke. Our main source of heat is a wood stove. He went outside and looked at the chimney, smoking lightly as it should be. He checked the exterior walls near the chimney for signs of heat. Nothing. There was a faint curl of smoke where the […]
The End of the World as We Know It
I spend entirely too much time thinking about the end of the world. I should clarify. I don’t think very much about the ways the world could actually end: climate change-related, nuclear disaster, asteroid. I spend more time thinking about zombies. Vampires. Dragons. Maybe aliens. But mostly zombies, the Walking Dead kind more than the […]
Once Upon a Time There Was a Girl Who
I grew up knowing my father was maybe a Gypsy, the kind that travelled around Ireland with beautiful spotted horses and painted caravan wagons. Or maybe my mother, like Janet of Carterhaugh, met Tam Lin in the forest and battled for him with the Queen of Fairies. The government told me she was 32, he […]
Hummingbirds and Things Like That
It began in Tina Ludden’s garden. You wouldn’t just guess that because Tina Ludden was widely known to favor all things organic. She had a butterfly garden and she had a vegetable garden and she’d never use Miracle Grow, only compost, and her gardens, both of them, were known to be among the best on […]
