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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…

(The title of this post has got me thinking about an old B-movie called Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. It starred Bill Maher as an adventurer in some remote jungle, and mainly I remember he ran into a tribe of submissive men who threw potholders at passers-by. They were called the Donahues. I’d…

For years now, my husband has been telling me–everytime I close a book and start babbling about how brilliant it was and how much I loved it–that I should start over from the beginning, re-read it, and see how it’s put together. And it’s not that I’ve disagreed with that, but there are so many…

Last week, Letitia Baldrige–social secretary/chief of staff to Jackie Kennedy, writer, etiquette guru–died at 86. When someone’s known for writing about etiquette, you form certain preconceived notions. I know I did before I met Mrs. Baldrige in 2000. I was working for a trade magazine specializing in the meetings industry, and my boss liked the idea…