Philip Roth’s birthday was noted on Garrison Keillor’s almanac, and included a choice bit of wisdom that should urge us all to boldness. Note that Roth is the novelist who reached his first fame with Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), about a man obsessed with sex. Roth is quoted as saying: “I cannot and do not live […] Read More

I did something this morning that I’ve been telling myself I needed to do for weeks, perhaps months. Cleaned the aquarium. This involves a siphon and a tube that runs over the side and into a bucket. It vacuums up goldfish waste. What a surprise that I don’t get around to it too often. But […] Read More

I just put in the mail the family history I threw together over five intense days; sent it to my Mom for her birthday. Now I feel like I finished exams, even more so than I do when finishing the draft of a book. I worked on this little 30 page item like a madwoman. […] Read More

I’m alarmed and saddened by the ongoing disaster in the newspaper industry. Yesterday was a sort of Black Monday here in Raleigh, another long list of very good reporters and editors got their pink slips at The News & Observer. In the last few weeks, one major American paper has died and another has cut […] Read More

For the last three days, I’ve worked enormous numbers of hours on an unlikely-for-me project: a bit of genealogy that I’m turning into a riveting story of one line of my family: the Tuckers and Woffords. Months ago my mother gave me a folder about her father’s family, a bunch of bits and pieces, and […] Read More

Here are a few more blossoms to remind you to spring forth with your own brilliant creations. Even though the climate might create some obstacles. Years ago, I said to my therapist about the market for literary novels: “you don’t know what’s it’s like, it’s working in a cage with a tiger.” (Not the most […] Read More

Spring is without question the boldest time of year, sending tender shoots and delicate flowers up into iffy weather. March is a bit like a writer sending out a manuscript, or anyone who’s hunting for a new job in a tough economy. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land” about the cruelly unpredictable and […] Read More

Because I (and others) consider my novel-in-progress to be a transgressive book involving transgressive sex, I was very struck when I received a comment about this sort of thing in an email conversation with my friend George. (I should mention that George, a visual artist and poet, doesn’t like capital letters.) “i consider (Updike) to […] Read More

If there were ever a person who went her own way, it was the famously abrupt Georgia O’Keefe. The Smithsonian Journeys blog has a charming story about an encounter with the painter: “The Day I Met Georgia O’Keefe.” The boldest individual involved is the author who tells of the day she approached O’Keefe’s house in […] Read More

When I started my first full-time job after college as a news reporter, I met at the NC Legislature a red-headed woman who was always there working on behalf of good causes. The League of Women Voters is the one I recall from back then, 39 years ago. Her name was Betty Ann Knudsen, and […] Read More