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 […]
North Carolina Writers
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 […]
Pen/Hemingway Recognition
Every writer has a dream award, the one that she knows would change life forever. Pen/Hemingway, an award for first fiction book, has always been one of those for me. It’s the kind of award that you can get only when you are starting out. Only first-time fiction writers are eligible. It’s a fairy tale […]
North Carolina Writers Conference
No, that’s not a typo. It’s a Conference. Way back in the day, sometime in the 1950s, Paul Green and a bunch of his friends got together and had some drinks and went skinny dipping in Albemarle Sound. As legend goes, he stood and said, Welcome to the first meeting of the North Carolina Writers […]