Southwest Cucumber Salad

What do you do when you miss a couple of days at the vegetable garden and your cucumbers look like this? And when your tomatoes have not yet ripened to make gazpacho with those cucumbers? I have that problem right now. Because of the late frosts in our region of North...
The Arrows of Doubt Strike Early

The Arrows of Doubt Strike Early

I returned yesterday from my magical residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities​ where I started a brand new novel. This morning I got up excited to resume the routine of making coffee and sitting down with my laptop and my WIP. I made the mistake of...
Still the Girl With the Encylopedia

Still the Girl With the Encylopedia

After my dad gave up sword swallowing, he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman for the American People’s Encyclopedia. We were probably the only family in America that had a complete set of current encyclopedias along with a rack of sabres, cutlasses and...

I Discovered This About Procrastination

Why do writers procrastinate? Why do we avoid the task we say we love? As if looking at a wordless page might blight our vision? In fact, once those words hit the page, our vision begins to take shape. Could it be we fear the vision? Certainly not the vision, but our...
Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge

Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge

I’m heading out to Asheville, NC today to see and hear Sara Gruen read from her newest novel, At the Water’s Edge at Malaprops Bookstore tomorrow night. This is particularly meaningful to me because I missed her first book tour back in 2007 when she swung...