books

Gee, when you make it easier for women to have kids without giving up all their independence, financial security, and career trajectory, they have more children. Here’s the money quote: Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is...
Read More »

A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she...
Read More »

I’ve added a couple of features to the blog — if you look to the left you’ll see a link to Interviews and Profiles, and Place Last Seen. One of the things I’m liking about WordPress is having the flexibility to post some longer pieces. In the Interviews and Profiles section I’ve posted an...
Read More »

… instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could...
Read More »

I’ve written about memoir before, and the recent James Frey brouhaha has gotten me thinking about it all again. I actually haven’t done much work on my book these past couple of months because the avalanche of freelance work I picked up when I thought I might want to quit my job at the...
Read More »

Okay, here’s what I forgot — if you’ve been writing and editing on a computer screen all day, it is very difficult to read anything else in the evening. It was a long week in the trenches — life at the Big Corporation is kind of hectic, and I was finishing a freelance copyediting...
Read More »

I took last week off — and while I didn’t go to Paris this year, tant pis, c’est trop cher, I must say, I highly reccommend the vacation-at-home. I slept late every day, often with both dogs snoring away in a big snuggly pile in my bed. I got some writing done, and got...
Read More »

Sometimes a person just needs a weekend where you really don’t do anything. This is a concept I came to late in life — until I moved to California and got my job at the Big Corporation, I’d always worked at least two jobs, and one of them was usually retail. Which means I...
Read More »

I woke up this morning thinking about a comment that Leah, over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen posted on her website. Apparently, by blogging about domestic life, and in particular, blogging about cooking a nice dinner for her husband and young son on Valentine’s Day, she called down the Voice of the Disapproving...
Read More »

Rest in Peace James Welch has died. I only met him once, years ago, at the very first Art of the Wild conference. He led a workshop with a participant we’d been really worried about — he was this older man from Alaska who had, to our enormous alarm, sent us the entire manuscript...
Read More »