Posts by Gin Phillips

You know, I never even thought about the possibility of HAVING a favorite fountain until I went to New China Buffet. (Off Crestwood Blvd., in the same shopping center as The Edge Theater.) New China Buffet is, as my husband says, the closest thing Birmingham has to Vegas. Just walk in and you’ll see what…

Towards the end of May, we went to New York for a mere 48 hours (that was the plan at least). It was a baby-less trip, so didn’t want to push our luck with grandparents, though they swear they would keep him endlessly. We wanted to make the most of our travel time, so—silver lining…

I am now slightly under a month from the release date for my first middle-grade book, The Hidden Summer. Come one, come all on June 13th to get your copies!! (I once went to a Dolly Parton concert where she said she was hawking her wares, and I think of that phrase–in her voice–every time…

My boy is 20 months old now, and we’re becoming expert linguists. Or maybe he’s the expert. At any rate, we seem to be learning his language instead of the other way around. For months, now, The Boy has been interspersing his few clearly pronounced words–Dada, Mama, bye-bye, etc.–with a whole lot of sounds that…

So I have not totally abandoned the rereading project I mentioned ages ago. I got a little sidetracked reading The Sound and the Fury, which I had read in high school, but I don’t think it counts as a read re-read. For one thing, I seem to have confused chunks of it with Of Mice and Men. Oops.…

Several days ago, we went to Oxford, Miss., with “we” being me, baby, husband, and students involved in husband’s Faulkner class. We were nervous about the trip both for baby reasons (loud, chatty baby who is still pretending to be a barbarian even though Halloween is long over) and weather reasons (ice and snow.) The…

Every year around this time, we build some sort of edible construction. In the past, we’ve done a gingerbread Loch Ness (gummy fish, gingerbread monster, fruit roll-up water) and a gingerbread castle (gummy bear defenders, Twizzler drawbridge). This year we tried rice krispie treat skyscrapers. It SEEMED like a good building material. It was problematic.…

Just sitting here in my office thinking how much I like the view to my left. It’s not exactly what I imagine Faulker or Hemingway had, but it’s a fine, fine view. You’ll see: A parrot pinata (a gift from my friend Tina when Come in and Cover Me came out), a painting of Dolly…