Welcome to my site…
After earning my MFA in creative writing, I began a career in writing and publishing. I’ve been an editor and writer for reference book and education publishers, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Scholastic Press, and National Geographic Learning. I’ve written professional profiles and articles for MIT and Radcliffe, as well as graphic novelizations of Greek myths.
On this site I offer observations and links to things I’m reading, hearing, and seeing, as well as to what I’m cooking! as I work on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the 1930s. Current tagline: A house with a history. A woman with a future. Two nations on the brink.
I hope you’ll join me here from time to time, Please comment on my posts!
What I’m Reading
Heroines for Our Time
Just as Maria Tatar's wonderful book, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, led me to read in a new way, it has inspired me to try to write a book review in a new way. I've been sitting here puzzling over the task, wondering whether I need to summarize her argument. I rarely...
Hell of a Book
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott is a brave exploration of Blackness from the perspective of a successful author on book tour who is enamored with a funeral director/undertaker, a young boy who haunts him, and a boy (who may be the same boy or not) who is shot down by...
These Walls Between Us
As a white woman with a long-standing interest in understanding race and racism in the United States, I have read many books that examine the structures of racial inequality in the United States and beyond. Books such as The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, The Color of...
What I’m Seeing and Hearing
The Half-Life of Marie Curie at Central Square Theater
This performance was so gripping and enlightening that it wasn't until the play was brought to an abrupt halt that I had any inkling that one of the two women on the stage was in the midst of a medical emergency. Central Square Theater generously offered all of us in...
Hadestown: It’s a Sad Song, But We Sing It Anyway
As the opening number of the musical Hadestown began during the Broadway in Boston production, I felt a surge of patriotism. What a great thing our American musical tradition is, that we can blend blues and Broadway and ragtime to create this fabulous mix of rhythm...
Stacey Abrams!
When I think of her name, I hear it to the tune of the opening of "Oklahoma!" What a woman she is, and I had the chance to hear and see her live, along with about 1500 other people here in my hometown, in a conversation with local public radio host Meghna Chakrabarti....
What I’m Cooking
A Vegetarian Holiday
I'm planning my holiday meals—basically Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—for a family gathering. Christmas Eve will be a vegetarian red borscht adapted from NYTimes recipe with buttermilk corn bread from Crescent Dragonwagon recipe and a purchased buche de noel....
Brown Rice and Swiss Chard
An astonishing, delightful, and moving adaptation of Moby Dick kept me fascinated for nearly three and a half hours at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA the other night. The set and props range from the elegant to the primitive. Having read the novel...
Farro, Lime, and Basil
A recipe for halloumi, corn, basil, tomatoes, and lime caught my eye, but I didn't have any halloumi. But I had farro and chick peas as well as fresh basil, corn, cherry tomatoes, and a lime, so I air-fried the chick peas (after tossing in olive oil and Trader Joe's...
What I’m Thinking
The Playmobil Nativity Problem
Throughout my son's childhood, I loved Playmobil toys. I think I loved him more than he did, and since I worked in a building above an FAO Schwartz store in downtown Boston, it was easy to keep adding little sets. I loved the miniature props, especially those in the...
A Change of Sex
November 20 is Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that has gotten me thinking about the great reporter and historian Jan Morris. Morris will have died exactly one year ago on November 20, 2020, at the age of 94. Morris was not murdered in a hate crime, unlike those...
The Pleasure of Reading While Waiting
I spent a lovely morning sitting on a hard red bench in room filled with the smell of tires at Costco. It wasn't the bench or the smell that made the morning lovely, but the fact that I had brought along the October issue of Harper's magazine to read while I waited....
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