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

I went to a birthday party this weekend where the adult being so honored didn’t want to come into the house and greet the waiting party. And he knew this get-together was going to happen. So he stood around in the driveway, then on the porch, for quite a while. The buffet spread was out–and […] Read More

Just when I get blogging down and have ever-so-confusedly waded into Facebook, here comes the rolling thunder of Twitter. It has been around. But never so publicly and famously as in recent weeks, or so it seems to me. Months ago I made some move to sign up for it, but have done nothing with […] Read More