Bridging the Gap Between My Writing and Reading Selves:
an Author’s Experience of Recording an Audiobook
“The woman who read Climbing the Stairs aloud did a great job,” my friend said. She was telling me, with delight, how her children and their friends—two girls and two boys—listened with rapt attention to the audio book version of my debut novel, refusing to get out of the car when the trip ended but […]
Virginia Euwer Wolff: The Guys’ Clubhouse
I didn’t even ask why I was turning into Holden Caulfield. I was fifteen, a brochure girl for postwar innocence. And I was a farm kid, three thousand miles away from Holden’s Manhattan; I took violin lessons, rode my bike through orchards, memorized social studies facts, picked strawberries to make money, earned Camp Fire Girl […]
Planting Giant Pumpkin Seeds
As I write this, Minnesota is in line to get hit with another Major Winter Storm. I know many of you in the northern latitudes can sympathize as we’ve all been hit, but it’s mid-April, and even by Minnesota standards, this is demoralizing. Proms are being cancelled this weekend, the grocery stores are crazy, everyone’s […]
The Kindness of Teachers
I loved first grade. Fifty-one years later, I still have vivid memories of my teacher, Miss Follett. She played the piano every day. She read to us from her giant book of poetry. She showed us photos of her trips to exotic places, like Alaska and Hawaii. At Halloween we screamed in terror and delight […]
Art and Words, Words and Art
Thirty years ago, I bought a poster of “Jungle Tales” by J.J. Shannon (1895) at the Met in New York City. I took it to my favorite framer, but when it was ready, I was horrified to see they’d cut off Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Children’s Bookshop at the bottom, framing just the image. […]
Tiny House, Cozy Cabin
A few months ago, my husband and I sold our home of 30 years and decided to live full-time in our cozy cabin in the woods. We left behind greater square footage, a quaint and sometimes bustling village on the waterfront, and a home with lots of family memories. But it was time for a […]
On Growing Older … Old
Why is “older” an acceptable word and “old” almost forbidden? To answer my own question, I suppose it’s because we’re all growing older, even the four-year-old next door. But old … ah, old smacks of incompetence, of irrelevance. Even worse, old smacks of that truly obscene-to-our-society word … death. I am approaching my birthday month. […]
Windward into Revision
In August 2016, I traveled to Vinalhaven Island off the coast of Maine to participate in a week-long festival honoring former resident Margaret Wise Brown. I gave a talk one evening, and, most fun of all, led a workshop in which attendees penned poetry and even a picture book in Margaret’s lyrical style. Back home […]
Always the Weather
(originally written in October 2016) According to the real estate establishment in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, there are, on average, 242 days of sunshine. That is, they claim more shining sun than in Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Los Angeles. That’s the way it is today: An absolutely clear blue sky, with not one cloud. […]
A Working Writer’s Life, Part 2
[continued from Part 1] After several months, I realized New York didn’t recognize I was the Next Big Thing. I’d actually have to write my second book and sell it. Timing was on my side. It was the early 80s, when paperbacks filled mall bookstore racks. Series books with new titles each month, priced for […]
A Working Writer’s Life, Part 1
One Sunday morning in May, 1970, I sat on the mustard-colored sofa in our living room with the Spring Children’s Books issue of the Washington Post Book World. I studied the reviews as someone who intended to have her book reviewed in that publication, preferably the Spring 1971 issue. The back page featured an ad […]
Knowing My Own Mind
There are times when I don’t know my own mind. Worse, there are times when I think I know my mind perfectly well and then find an entirely different mind on a later visit to my opinions. Which feels almost as though I have no mind at all. Some time ago one of my favorite […]
Babies and Puppies
What, really, can be more life-affirming than a beautiful baby or cuddly puppies? On June 26th, both arrived in our lives. One baby—our first grandchild, Olivia—born to our son and Korean daughter-in-law. We received the news via FaceTime from Seoul, South Korea. Though they had Broadway related jobs in NYC, they opted to move to […]
Behind the Poem, “What She Asked”
Listen to Virginia’s poem, “What She Asked,” on Poetry Mosaic, the April 7th entry, and then read her description of the real-life event behind the poem. In a rural Oregon high school where I taught English more than 20 years ago, we had big teaching areas separated by screen-wall things, but they came nowhere near […]
In Draft
“He was always chasing the next draft of himself.” American critic Dwight Garner, in the New York Times Book Review on February 16 of this year, was describing the childhood of Henry James. An expandable list comes to mind, some of our memorable figures moving toward the next draft of themselves: Anne Shirley, Holden Caulfield, […]