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
Maria Tatar offers a fresh vision of “heroinism” from a feminine and feminist perspective.
Hell of a Book
Jason Mott’s polyphonous novel explores the impact of police murders on even the most success-insulated Black men.
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
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
May 30, 2021: Lentil Soup & Salad
It was unseasonably chilly here in eastern Massachusetts over Memorial Day weekend, so last night I made lentil soup by sauteeing an onion on medium in Instant Pot, along with half a red pepper and four julienned carrots in 2 tsps of olive oil. Sauteeing on medium for...
May 29, 2021: Farro, Greens, and Cauliflower
I recently had dinner with my friend Nancy. Farro and salad. Was it so satisfying because of the food or the conversation? I'm not sure. Honestly I had forgotten about farro--my husband tells me I used to make it, but then I stopped from some reason. Was it because I...
Sometimes the best meal
is a simple broccoli and cheese frittata (or omelet) and a green salad with a homemade olive oil, sherry vinegar, honey, and garlic dressing.
What I’m Thinking
The Playmobil Nativity Problem
What is it about us white people that makes us think it’s okay to depict people from the Bible as looking like us, when they obviously did not?
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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