From the category archives:

Write

The Joy of Books

January 12, 2012

Found the above on this delightful site with the silly name sent to me by my sister-in-law (thank you!). The photos on the site make me want to pound the table and say, with Sally, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” (I heart bookshelves.)

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Reading is Not Optional

January 10, 2012

Walter Dean Myers is being sworn in today as the new Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, an ungainly title, but a great job. His stated theme for his time in the post is, “Reading is not optional.” On NPR this morning he talks about his life, reading, and some of the initiatives he hopes to [...]

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Reading aloud in Advent time

December 10, 2011

I’ve been silent for weeks here, finishing NaNoWriMo (52K, baby!) and then, guess what, having so much fun on the current novel that it’s all I want to work on in those wee dark morning moments I secrete away for my creative delight. And by the way, I wasn’t having much fun for the first [...]

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Peru: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; Mario Vargas Llosa, 1977

June 4, 2011

Once again, of late, the quantity of books on the property has far exceeded the available shelf space, a dreadful and recurring problem. The books with no home make their way to the floor of my studio, spilling out in an ever-rising sea of books. Probably best to avoid flood metaphors in difficult times such [...]

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Read Around the World

May 20, 2011

Two things I’ve wanted for a long time came into my life this week, an electric kettle* and a world map shower curtain. Examining the latter is surprising (look how long and skinny the Red Sea is!), mystifying (just what, exactly, is going on down at the tip of South America?), and inspiring. Specifically, it [...]

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Shakespeare & Company, Paris

April 13, 2011

They have a fabulous website, too.

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flowers in winter (window ledge in the atom age)

February 10, 2011

Fresh flowers for weeks in winter for only a few dollars = forced narcissus bulbs = paper whites. Why? To remind us that under the earth all is not dead; spring will come, the grass will grow, flowers will bloom again. Find the bulbs at florists, garden and farm supply stores, sometimes even at the [...]

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Life, death, and French

February 2, 2011

A month seems long enough to be silent, a strange month turning on the multifarious spokes of the wheel of life. Death, coming to people we think too young to die—we, with our secret hopes of long, fulfilling lives, of seeing our grandchildren and great-grandchildren be born. And birth, which can come earlier than it [...]

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Fail Harder

December 15, 2010

I don’t love pushpins as much as I love thumbtacks (I really love thumbtacks, the way they still come on a piece of cardboard as they have my whole life, the way you can stick them into both sides of that cardboard when you’re taking stuff down, the way they’re so metallic and sharp…well, you [...]

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We all contribute

November 25, 2010

In honor of my grandmother, Laura Popenoe, on Thanksgiving, I want to say that we all contribute. Some of us are the life of the party at the groaning Thanksgiving board, telling stories so riveting that the entire table sits rapt, ending with a punchline that knocks everyone off their seats, dizzy with laughter. But [...]

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