That Lovely Ornament, the Moon
by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Phyllis Root Jackie: We’ve passed the Solstice but we still have more night than day. We can watch the moon with our breakfast and with our dinner. We thought we’d celebrate this season of the moon by sharing some stories featuring that lovely ornament. Phyllis: And Christmas Eve we saw […]
Two for the Show: Winter Stories
by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Phyllis Root Jackie: Ah winter. Season of holidays and snow. Such a richness of stories. Phyllis: I have a shelf full of favorite Christmas books. What most of them have in common is story, not just about Christmas itself but also about families celebrating their connection to each other. They […]
Chair of Honor for Vera B. Williams
by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Phyllis Root Jacqueline Briggs Martin: Some writers teach us craft. Some writers inspire us. Vera B. Williams does both. As part of celebrating her wonderful life and career we want to take another look at her lovely stories and her busy life. One of the many remarkable things about her […]
Two for the Show: What Scares You?
Note to readers: we are trying a new format this month. We want to make our blog more conversational. Let us know what you think. Phyllis Root: What scares you? How do you deal with that fear? And why do so many of us like to scare ourselves silly, as long as we know that […]
Two for the Show
by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Phyllis Root We want to start by saying that we are loving the chance to look at forgotten books or wonderful classics from the past that this blog has given us. And this time, when we were thinking of what we might look at, John Steptoe came to mind— maybe […]
Two for the Show: How Does Your Garden Grow?
by Phyllis Root and Jacqueline Briggs Martin It’s high summer in the garden, with an abundance of vegetables to harvest and flowers abuzz with pollinators. Crunchy carrots, leafy kale, sun-warm tomatoes, garlic bulbs, green beans, zucchini (some gigantic) all offer themselves to the gardener. But more grows in a garden than plants. People grow, too, […]
Two for the Show: Three Books on the River
by Phyllis Root and Jacqueline Briggs Martin Summertime. And whether we live by water or only dream of living by water, reading about river adventures is fun. We are fortunate to have a number of wonderful books that take us out onto the water. We are unfortunate that only one of the books on today’s […]
Going Wild
By Phyllis Root and Jackie Briggs Martin Who doesn’t go a little wild when spring finally arrives? And even though we set out to choose pairs of books to write about, this month we couldn’t resist a hat trick of three books. At the heart of each is not only wildness but also how those […]
Two for the Show
by Jackie Briggs Martin and Phyllis Root We both love finding forgotten treasures in the “removed from circulation” sections of libraries or in second hand bookstores. Some of these books call to us because we remember them from our childhoods: the Babar books written out in longhand, the Flicka, Ricka, Dicka stories about Swedish triplets, […]