“[We] never turn sentimental about something of real value — wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy — until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer affectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough.” – Hal Crowther My boxing […]
Read moreMy first novel: welcome to the world.
Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
Read moreWe have a cover!
With thanks to Robert Hand and the team at Bowen Press Books and to the students of my first-session “Writing in London” class, who offered comments on previous versions that have been incorporated here. Can’t wait to see it in book form.
Read morePowering up in Kings Cross.
At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
Read more“What will survive of us is…”
Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
Read moreRIP: Diana Athill.
The great and graceful writer Diana Athill has just passed away, age 101. Here’s a piece I wrote about her for the literary site BLOOM (about writers and other artists who come into their prime after age 40). https://bloom-site.com/2013/07/01/diana-athill-the-sufficient-self/?fbclid=IwAR3eUILJ-epywb7ZdsU1IiVWwzh2JVinEqQQTPjo1lbu5M1bTtDDmRtjjLg
Read moreBrexiting, teaching, and time-travelling.
“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.” – Susan Orlean, The Library Book — Is this the year we finally learn to distinguish story from myth, and lies from both of […]
Read moreOn Marghanita Laski’s “The Victorian Chaise-Longue.”
The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski (1953), published by Persephone Books (1999) “We think back through our mothers,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “if we are women.” Marghanita Laski’s terrifying novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) spins this proposition sideways. What if becoming a mother makes a woman a time-traveler against her will? What if mothering allows memory […]
Read morePushcart Nomination for “The Serpent!”
I’m delighted to announce that my story “The Serpent,” which appeared in The Hopper Issue III, has been nominated by the journal’s editors for a Pushcart Prize. Many thanks to the wonderful folks at The Hopper and congratulations to my fellow nominees!
Read moreWriting in buckets.
A new posting at Luther’s “Ideas and Creations” blog on a writing technique that’s working well in a busy time: https://www.luther.edu/ideas-creations-blog/?story_id=837794
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