When I was young, my family lived with my grandmother for a time in Washington, D.C. , in one of the old neighborhoods with houses of colonial brick and Italianate stucco. Grandmother’s house was a colonial, with perfect symmetry: a window on each side of the front door, three windows across the top, and a little […]
Archived Posts
Free Summer Writing Camp
I have been, like all of us, desperate to make a difference, escape isolation, connect during this time of coronavirus. I have observed during my spring classes on Zoom what a tremendous difference it makes for me and others to simply connect through writing–even on social media. I am not good at making masks. But […]
Summer Writers Plan
Dear Kitchen Table Writers, Below is a list of summer reading I plan to do — and I recommend for you. I’ve dipped into each of these and am eager to find a hammock somewhere and read for hours on end. Share your reading list in the comments! Summer Reading List Let Me Out Here, […]
Joni Mitchell’s Blues
I was at an Arists’ Residency, far from home, and things weren’t going well. There was lots of chatter about people you knew in New York, and I didn’t know anybody in New York unless you count my college roommate who lives in Harlem and my cousin who lives in New Jersey. The people I […]
A Field, A Quilt, A Novel
In his seminal novel Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe gave us an extraordinary place. In writing my new novel, INDIGO FIELD, I was inspired in part by Wolfe’s lush and vivid prose descriptions of extraordinary North Carolina places. To me, Indigo Field is a place so full of layers of history and mystery, plants and […]
Hemingway in Pittsboro
I used to think that as a writer I had to hole up in my little room and write and write, and never come out until I was done. But it dawned on me that unlike in journalism, with creative work nobody really cared if I ever finished something. That gets a little weird after […]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Writing Workshop at Meredith
A summer writing workshop is the dreamy creative home for every aspiring writer. Lord knows I’ve been to many of them. I’ll go to many more. But something has changed in my writing life. Now I teach them too. For the first time this year, I’ll be teaching at Meredith College’s summer writing workshops, June […]
Michael Jarmer’s Monster Talk
Just read Michael Jarmer’s novel Monster Talk and tweeted about it. It’s extraordinary. Why isn’t it a best seller? Everyone read this book! about love, childhood, the monster within, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. A young child, Victor, lives in Arizona, grows up with the family story that he is descended from ‘the monster’– the boy […]