On Facebook, which I find baffling, I’ve been “tagged” to tell 25 random facts about myself. (Facebook reminds me of the floor of the NC House of Representatives the first time I went there to cover a story as a reporter: people popping up randomly all over the place in one big room, busily clustering […] Read More

Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s better for all of us if I cut back and spend as little as possible, or continue spending as usual, or do what I can of next year’s Christmas shopping now in order to spur the woeful economy. So far my own income has held steady in these trying […] Read More

Today’s little spark of inspiration comes from a milk carton. This morning as I took the chocolate Silk soymilk out of the fridge, I noted the advice on the side: “Take A Sip Forward,” a sentence that, by the way, is trademarked. The idea is that drinking soy milk is “one small step toward living […] Read More

Allow me to crow. After two and three quarters hours of fiddling, husband Bob and I have succeeded in getting wireless to work at our house on my laptop. We’ve never even been able to use a cellphone here. We’re in the woods and apparently hard for signal to find. This miraculous computing capability was […] Read More

When I was a kid, my mother used to drop pieces of advice on me as they happened to occur to her. One day, she said, somewhat out-of-the-blue: Never buy a business; you’ll come out much better if you start your own. I did do exactly that, when I was twenty-two and started freelancing full-time. […] Read More

Seems to me that though there’s a lot of scrambling going on in these difficult economic days, in some sense the country is on hold. Lots of decisions, actions, expenditures have been delayed. (Yesterday a writer told me about her novel, which was close to sold in October. A well-known editor at a major house […] Read More

My friend Sabine was helping a mutual friend overhaul the inside of her house. They’d been hard at it all morning and then met me for lunch (I, who had merely been sitting at a computer.) Their dust-stirring industry was inspiring to hear about. Sabine had learned a lot of her techniques, she said, from […] Read More

My one meeting, some years ago, with my hero John Updike involved a very small bit of boldness, which turned out well in its modest way. It took place not long after my first novel Revelation had come out. I wrote about the incident at the time for a Research Triangle newspaper. I’m “the local […] Read More

Recently, in discussing the writer’s self-doubt in the comments with writer Greta, I speculated that even my hero the recently passed John Updike probably had such moments. In one of the tributes to Updike in The New Yorker since, I found proof of this. In a letter to novelist E.L. Doctorow, Updike wrote that as […] Read More

I’ve just come from my friend Laurel‘s 70th birthday brunch, held by the members of her Thursday afternoon writer’s class/group, which I have been a member of for 26 years. In advance of the day, we put together a small album in which we each had six pages to use as we wish to express […] Read More