DATELINE—April 22, 2020. Louisville, Kentucky In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, during the time between breakfast and lunch ______________________________________________________________________________________ Sheltering-in-place seems like an opportunity for a fabulous writing retreat. Alas, I find myself distracted, unable to adhere to my writing mantra, “Don’t wait to be inspired. Write to be inspired.” Time seems suspended. Unnatural. … Continue reading Distracted
Come together, virtually. Write now! Greetings from my home office—a high swivel stool at my kitchen breakfast bar. I love the way the light slants through this room and I can hear the birds singing, as if all is right with the world. Here I can easily distract myself when my writing inspiration wanes and I forget to listen to my own advice—"Don't wait … Continue reading Writing in the Time of Corona
I was five years old, my brother eleven, when my father excused us from the great American dining table to move to Wiesbaden, Germany, a country the Allies had defeated in WWII, its land mass the spoils of war, divided into east and west, rebuilding but endangered still. Our ship would depart the day after … Continue reading Migration—A memoir of moments
I first read about the hermit crab in Barbara Kingsolver's essay collection, High Tide in Tucson. In this true story about a stowaway crustacean, Kingsolver creates a lively lyrical first person narrative, in which the crab becomes a metaphor for how creatures habituate to their environments. Indeed, the hermit crab makes good metaphor. When you feel cramped, find a new shell to call … Continue reading Consider the Lowly Hermit Crab
A man at a party praised my husband for his determination to read all three volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — a literary tome, which “[in]several thousand pages, retraces the course of [the Frenchman's] adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters.” “Remembrance of Things … Continue reading Of Madeleines, Monuments and Memoir
