A good friend and member of my writing group, Saloma Furlong, has just posted a short interview with me on her website. She poses a number of questions about my writing process, how I look at it and how I experienced it. Check it out here, if you are interested. We are offering a drawing…

I’ve just recently talked with my Aunt Dot by phone. She is the remaining member of my mother’s family and is now past her mid-nineties and heading toward one hundred. My mind went back to something I wrote the year she turned ninety, when as many family members as possible gathered to celebrate with her.…

Many mornings I watched Aunt Esther dress. Her bedroom was across the hall from our upstairs living room. I’d go and sit on her bed waiting for her to come from the bathroom in her housecoat. Her dressing ritual was unvarying. She always began with her girdle, the literal foundation of her clothing. It held…

Those of you who have read The Blistering Morning Mist might remember the story about my mother’s paper dolls, the ones I didn’t want to be divided. They still exist, undivided, after almost 100 years. The other day I was searching for something in a storage box of her things and came across them. Glancing…

There is an image that comes to me when I am struggling, a way of picturing myself. I also used it with clients sometimes to help them picture how they were feeling about a task or a skill. Imagine a sturdy wooden beam stretching across a distance, a beam that is holding you up. It…

This is a season of the year crammed full of ritual—not just the churchy kind, although there is plenty of that, but many other customs and tradition that we perform faithfully and in the same way year after year. The little word the is often an indicator. We put up, not a tree, but the…

I posted this on my book webpage, hoping that it would trigger an announcement to you all that I’d posted something new, but it didn’t, so here is the good news, at least if you were thinking of giving The Blistering Morning Mist as a gift to all your friends! Just in time for holiday…

I’ve been thinking about this thing we call voice. It may seem hackneyed and overworked these days, but its presence or lack continues to be a dynamic in the lives of many of us. I know I’ve come a long way, but I am far from completely confident. I still tell myself that what I…

I have been mostly silent in terms of this blog for the past two months. It seems life had conspired to rush me from one kind of deadline to another, making me wonder whether I should retire from retirement in order to sit and put my feet up with a good book and a cup…

As with any wait, this one has come to an end. My book is in print and I have received my first copy! It all happened much faster than I expected after I gave my final okay to the corrected, typeset version. Within days I received a picture of the cover . . . And…