There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
- Emily Dickinson
Libraries hold a special place in my heart. The public library in my hometown of Lebanon, Indiana was the place I spent most Saturday mornings as a child. My mom [...]
read on... →In 1870, there were over thirty thousand children living on the streets of New York and many more who wandered in and out of cellars and tenements as their familes struggled to scrape together enough income to put food on the table.
Under the mentorship of sister physicians Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, my great-great [...]
read on... →After you’ve finished writing a novel, there comes a moment when you decide to pack up the notebooks, index cards, and sticky notes you’ve scattered through your life for the past few years and bid them a fond farewell. It’s a bittersweet process to be sure, but it’s also a time of excitement, because (if [...]
read on... →Early in the summer I began working with Sarah Smith, an amazing young film maker and alum of the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts Teen Academy on a project inspired by The Virgin Cure. It was an honour to work with her and I have to say, when I viewed the final edit of [...]
read on... →So, it’s seven days into September and this one’s been lovely and good so far. And that’s important – because I’ve had at least a couple of Septembers that have left me wrecked. One in the late 90′s that ended in a personal upheaval of the heart and of [...]
read on... →
When I was a child I loved finding things…a jar of my grandmother's old buttons, a cigar box filled with boy scout badges and river stones, a flouncy party dress pushed to the back of my mother's closet - circa 1955. With every relic I discovered, there came a story. Real or imagined, the tales that surrounded each object were magic, making the 'thing' more immediate, something more than it was before I'd found it.
Fact or fiction, fantastic, joyful or sad, stories make us more than we were before we found them. Welcome to my shoebox of buttons, sealing wax and scribblings.
- posted on 16/05/2012 23:03:49
