Glimpsing the bluebird of happiness
Feb 9th
One dull, chilly morning a few weeks ago, I looked up from my laptop to see a flutter of blue and red in the living room window of our house in the Berkshires. An American bluebird was snacking on the winterberry branches that I’d tucked among the pine cones and More >
Rage against the dying of the Christmas tree lights!
Jan 10th
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas wrote in the famous villanelle for his dying father. But I think it also applies to this time of year, when all the glistening, twinkling things that help us celebrate the holidays must finally be put away. Why? I don’t More >
Treat yourself to a little bit of heaven — Angel Slices!
Dec 16th
When I left home after college, my mother gave me two books that I think she felt equipped me fully for life on my own: The Holy Bible and Irma Rombauer’s original edition of The Joy of Cooking. In those days I wasn’t much of a cook — and even More >
Barnes and Noble in Jenkintown, PA— local, welcoming, and thriving
Dec 13th
The B & N in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, not far from my hometown of Bryn Athyn could — except for its size — easily be mistaken for the kind of intimate and inviting community-based retailer that has now become the assumed province of independent bookstores.
I was there on Sunday for a More >
“…Let us not forget to be kind.”
Dec 7th
I recently had the honor of being asked to talk to the Tuesday Club in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They get together once a month in the lovely brick meeting hall of the First Congregational Church which, with its old New England austerity and grace, looks like something out of a Norman More >
The difference between a lightning bug and lightning
Nov 22nd
If, as an acerbic but hilarious Colson Whitehead said this past weekend at the Miami Book Fair, “today in America, the literary audience is about the size of a microbe on the butt of an ass,” then most of the microbes in the country had somehow found their way to More >
How do the French do it?
Nov 14th
French gardens are a lot like French women: chic and elegant and pulled together in a way that makes the average American gardener want to just throw in the spade. I’ve made something of a study of the French garden over the years — from the glorious and enormous public More >
Do you share my sense of wanderlust?
Nov 7th
Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a small, close-knit community, but something in me periodically needs to break free, sail away, explore the wider world. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” she writes: “What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in More >
Where were you when the snowstorm hit?
Oct 31st
My husband, a lifelong reader and writer, is a stickler about the proper usage of the English language and is constantly after our nieces and nephews for affixing the word “awesome” to every other utterance. As in “my friend’s new chocolate Labradoodle is awesome.” The dictionary defines the adjective as More >
My Move to Rural Inspiration
Oct 20th
Here are some thoughts about my “writing place,” from my recent guest post on a blog called Savvy Verse & Wit, dedicated to all literary and poetic works:
During the years I worked in advertising in New York City, I would try to fit in an hour or two of writing More >