Teaching
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Changes in Latitude: Writing Under an Assumed Name
Alone every night in that cinderblock house during a frozen upstate New York winter, I realized I was on my own for the first time in my life. No family members to take Jen for a few hours if I needed to work or do errands. No friends around the corner to grouse to at night. I’d never lived in a place more desolate or quiet. The scraggly field in front of the house turned brown as the days began to cool off and August rolled into September. The house settled into black corners by 4:30 if I didn’t turn on a few lights. The bedrooms, on the back side…
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Writing Inspirations: The Beginning
Nehru jackets in thick, scratchy brown wool. Thirty-two-inch bell bottoms my father wore in the Navy. His double-breasted pea jacket, the warmest jacket I’ve ever worn. A Roaring Twenties-style hip-length top over a pleated skirt that came to mid-thigh, pink and ivory colored with stripes accenting the top’s v-neck. A vintage 1940s brown tween winter coat, large circular buttons holding it snug from its skinny waist to its Peter Pan collar. A full-length winter wool, brown monk’s cloak. A floppy pink felt hat. A tan suede fringe jacket with a 12” beaded swing. The more I wanted to fit in, the more unique my clothes became in Junior High and…
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Writing from the Beach
I’ve been writing since I was nine, and throughout this long, often rocky, career, I’ve always dreamed of writing in a house near the beach. I imagined a cold, winter beach, where I was the only person on a long stretch of sand. For me, staring at a stretch of water, preferably one that crashes and roars, gives me permission to write the stories that have rattled around in my head every day of my life. When I chased grasshoppers in the empty lot across the street from the projects where I grew up, I longed for those days when my father would pile all of us into the Buick…
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Writing Through the Tears
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweetbriar accommodates approximately 24 artists on a piece of property that rambles lazily over hills and pastureland. A hundred-year-old stone barn houses studios of all shapes and sizes so that everyone can be satisfactorily creative. Every evening after dinner, the artists, musicians, writers, composers, and artisans who have worked all day on their various projects commune in a room where a piano gets center stage and a fireplace fills one wall. The fire reflects warmly off a wall of sliding glass doors that look spectacular when the fire spreads to the roof . . . but that’s another story. At one of…
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Writing from the Beach
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Keeping Goals and Dreams In Front of You
I guess I’m getting a little sentimental, because I have a landmark birthday coming up, and it’s surprising me how impacted I am by it, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the future (as well as the past). For a writer, to look to the future means to evaluate where you are now and what you would like to be when you grow up. I guess I’m not grown up yet, because I’m still looking at a very long list of wishes and dreams and hopes and goals. I wonder sometimes what would happen if I finish this list. That’s a scary thought. During the last two years, I…
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Writing from the Beach
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Writing and Teaching
Good morning, and welcome! Sometimes we draw back the curtains on the artistic world, and it still seems glamorous, yet vague, to those who aren’t in the business of creating. It definitely can be mystifying, even to those of us who create, to describe that process to people who don’t live in our heads (I live in my head all the time — and I bet any amount of money you’re saying the same thing right now). I talked about my cross-country tour to promote my new novel, The Mourning Parade, last year, but that novel is doing its thing without me now (though I still love to talk about…
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Writing from the Beach
