Alright I Did It. I Started a Newsletter.

With social media in flux–who knows what’ll happen with Twitter?–it seemed like a good time to take the plunge on finally starting a newsletter. I’ll tell some stories. I’ll talk about my writing experience. I’ll share  what crazy thing my dog did. I’ll pass along some family recipes. (If you’d ever tried my grandmother’s cooking, you’d know this alone is worth the e-mail.) And I can do all that without worrying about the number of characters or the perfect photo or any of the other boundaries that pop up on Twitter and Instagram.

Here’s the other thing: I’ve been thinking more and more about where our stories come from these days. I’ve been thinking about my grandmother and her siblings–here they are in the photo below–and how their lives sparked my first novel, The Well and the Mine. Their real lives are absolutely under the surface of the characters’ fictional lives. I’d never have written Fierce Kingdom without having my own four-year-old to cart around the zoo. I’d never have written Come In and Cover Me if I hadn’t fallen in love myself.

That overlap between life and my fiction? Well, a newsletter seems like a good place to dig into it a little deeper.

So if that sounds appealing, sign-up on my Web site. You’ll only get an e-mail once every other month–six total a year. I’m looking forward to sharing some stories with you.

From top left: Me, my great uncle, my grandmother, and my great aunt.

 

 

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