Memories

Though I spent the summer traveling, I have no reports of nearly falling off cliffs because I got too close to the edge nor of staying out all night in the rain because I failed to book a hotel room in the height of the season, and this disappoints me a little, not because these…

I was five years old when I decided I wanted to make my living writing novels. It’s the only thing that has never changed about me. As I grew older, friends and family let me know how difficult it was to make a living as a writer. Becoming a writer, it seemed, was not a…

1. Rental scooters. Hipsters, stop running down little old ladies on the sidewalk, FFS. 2. Dog poop. 3. No matter how hard I try, my hair always looks like Lori Loughlin’s, and god knows this is not what I want. 4. That dude in the Atlas Shrugged T-shirt. 5. No one wears jeans, not even…

Every Tuesday, we go to the farmers market and I give Jessica four dollars to buy a chocolate-pecan cookie from the French baker (literally a baker who is French). And every Tuesday there just happens to be a second cookie that is broken or otherwise not quite good enough to sell to customers that makes…

One of the things I have missed in the pandemic is getting new inputs and having new experiences. These lead to serendipities in my writing (problems solved and new directions taken) and keep me engaged and energized. A few months ago, just emerging from our isolation, my daughter and I went to a harbor-side restaurant…

When I started writing The Wanderer, I wanted to share my love for Old English literature and language but I’ve also been a writer and editor long enough to know that a strict adherence to the truth makes for poor storytelling. Fiction that is too self-conscious is metafiction, a story about story, or a story…