The Pleasure of Reading

Just got a phone call from my sister in California. She was in a bookstore, chatting with a family looking for a book that would be “appropriate” for a sophomore girl attending a Christian high school. The book had to be written by someone outside of the US and could not have been [...]

Writing about the Dead; or, Why I loved her

She liked to wear red sneakers. Not so much because she was under some mistaken assumption that they were stylish (they weren’t) but because she thought it was funny for a great-grandma in her eighties to be gallivanting around in red tennis shoes. When she came to visit me once while I lived [...]

Nineteen Things Meme

I just discovered that caveblogem tagged me with this meme. I have never been tagged before, so this is very exciting. (I know, how boring must my life be for that to be exciting!!) Anyway, I’ll give it a whirl…
1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it. [...]

Must writers write?

That may seem like a dumb question…but I wonder about the claims of many that if you do not write every day, indeed, feel compelled to write all of the time, that you are not really a “writer.” Obviously practice helps and all that. But need someone be constantly writing to consider herself [...]

Why can’t I get back to writing the book?

While I think my trip was really interesting (saw lots of cool sites, researched a ton and learned much that is relevant to the book I am writing), I am wondering why I am not writing the book itself and spending time on the account of the trip…
I wonder how much grief has to do [...]

The Grand Tour: Part 1

My great-great-grandparents settled in Minnesota after coming to America from the “Old Country,” and my grandmother was born on a homestead in Minnesota, so that lovely state was a big destination for my summer road trip. Trouble is I live a heck of a long way from the land of ten thousand lakes — let’s [...]

What the book is about…

My grandmother’s family story is the story of American history, at least the part of our country’s history that is generally printed in public school textbooks (and, yes, I realize that there is a lot left out in such cases!) Nevertheless, her family lived through many of the hallmark events of the last [...]

Why I am writing Grandma’s book…

All of my life my grandmother shared amazing stories of her family, stories that stuck with me over the years. At last I convinced her to write them down, with the promise that I would help her to turn them into a book. After working together on the project for four years, speaking by [...]