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
The Museum of Innocence
The narrator of this novel, Kemal Basmaci, presents this story of a destructive love affair as though he is giving the reader a tour of a private museum that he has constructed from the detritus of the affair--cigarette butts, maps, movie posters and stills, household...
Maxine Kumin: Prolific Poet, Feisty Feminist
Maxine Kumin (1925–2014) seems to be little known today, but she won major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and many honorary degrees. Kumin served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (a position now known as Poet...
Making Sense of Leonard Woolf’s “Three Jews”
While researching the atmosphere of Britain in the interwar years, I learned that the first book printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, Two Stories, included one by each of the husband-and-wife team. Leonard's was titled "Three Jews." Since I'm trying...
What I’m Seeing and Hearing
Hurricane Diane
I loved this fast-moving and delightful comedy, performed entirely by women/gender-neutral actors. The actors, especially Rami Magron, who played Diane/Dionysus, commanded my attention from the moment she stepped onto the stage. She was truly a force of nature! The...
The Yiddish Book Center
A trip to Amherst, Mass., allowed us to visit the Yiddish Book Center this afternoon. I remember seeing signs for this place when I lived in Amherst in the early 1980s. My impression was that it was then nothing more than an old barn filled with books written in...
Moby Dick in under 3 1/2 hours!
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...
What I’m Cooking
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...
The Pleasure of Small Appliances
In the past couple of years I've given into the lure of small cooking appliances. Rice cooker, multi-use pressure cooker, air fryer: as someone who wants to avoid clutter and who has a small kitchen, I resisted them for a long time. But recently I've figured out how...
What I’m Thinking
To Travel or Not
I am looking forward to a trip to Istanbul, planned for mid-October 2021. And yet we wonder whether travel means exposure to the Delta variant or other variants that might be even more pernicious. A recent episode of NPR's 1A discussed this issue, and one caller...
To boost creativity, create a schedule.
James Clear is a source of many smart ideas about productivity, habit formation, and personal change. The Myth of Creative Inspiration: Great Artists Don't Wait for Motivation The work of top creatives isn’t dependent upon motivation or creative inspiration. Rather,...
Why I Like to Travel This article, written for writers, also conveys the thrill of any kind of travel to an unfamiliar place.
A New Word for That Feeling When Travel Makes Everything New - aeon - Pocket There is, of course, so much to learn when any of us visit a place for the first time and it would be easy to assume that information passes in one direction only, from the host nation to its...