Category: Reading/Writing

  • Stuff worth reading

    “Writers Aren’t Who They Think They Are” by David Ebenbach What the novel says, I think, is that any single event is the result of many, many things. That’s why you have the hundreds of pages leading up to the climax; those pages suggest the philosophy that you can only fully understand that climax and…

  • WORK “Mother Courage” by James Wood In Offill’s original book: a young mother and ambitious writer, committed to her daughter and to her writing, tries to find energy and ambition for both; she must claim for writing the authority of necessity that usually attends parenthood. Art-making, unlike the great bourgeois panoply of family life, comes…

  • Ingrid and Andrea

    Last week, I posted “Shared Dreams, Shared Success: The Power and Value of Critique Partners” over at Writer Unboxed: For almost 10 years now, Sarah Wedgbrow, Stephanie Mooney, and Ingrid Palmer have been my critique partners. Somewhere along the way, they also became some of my closest friends. When we all lived in the same city, we would…

  • I had intended to post this in January, as a way of looking forward. But time sneaks by, and here we are, knocking on March’s door. Sometimes you wonder where the days and hours have gone. But in this case, I know exactly where. They’ve gone to Elmo, and flashcards, and Old MacDonald’s farm, and…

  • Opening credits Several months ago, I wrote a column for my dad’s newspapers about life as a new mother. Now I’m working on another one, about the part that technology played in our first year of parenting. Recently I read my friend Jasmine Warga’s second book, HERE WE ARE NOW. On the surface, it’s about…