This was written in the late 1990s. I had lost the file, and frankly thought I might have imagined I’d written the whole thing. And then last week, looking for something entirely else, I found it. I’ve softened a little bit on Marmee: Abba Alcott was doing the best she could in very trying circumstances (don’t get me started on Bronson Alcott, The Man and the Ego). But I’m still glad my daughter liked me better. It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been… Read more I Remember Marmee →
I believe I have said before: I was raised in a barn. Not as to table manners, but as to structure. My family had been in the process of converting… Read more Raised in a Barn: Objects in the Mirror May be Closer Than They Appear →
When I was a kid my parents bought a barn. Actually, they bought a farm, complete with 180 acres of land, a saggy Edwardian-era farmhouse, multiple very saggy outbuildings, and… Read more Raised in a Barn: Bats →
In the last election there was a brief, comic video by then-Vice President Joe Biden about making a plan to vote. Things don’t feel so comic now (although Biden really… Read more Making My Plan →
This post appeared at Bookview Cafe in 2014. A billion years ago (actually 24) I worked as a ghost-writer for a psychiatrist whose specialties were 1) working with women with serious psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar depression, etc.) who were the mothers of infants, and 2) infant depression (you will be unsurprised to know that they are frequently linked). About the time my older daughter was six months old, I quit–having my nose that deep into psychiatric dysfunction in infancy meant that every time my daughter hiccuped I was afraid she might be going into a… Read more Planned Obsolescence →
Dramatis Personae: Me and Emily the Dog. Place: our sunroom, where my favorite arm chair for working is located. Local temperature: 54 degrees. I am sitting in the arm chair… Read more It’s Good to be the Queen →
This post was originally published at Bookview Cafe in 2014. There’s been a ripple of dismay in the fantasy and SF corner of the fiction-verse over an interview with Russell Banks in The New York Times Book Review from last Sunday. The whole piece is interesting (a person who cannot read in bed, or on trains, planes, or buses without falling “instantly to sleep” is so directly opposite to me and my reading habits as to be intriguing) but the subhead on the piece explains the kerfuffle: The author, most recently,… Read more Death and Fantasy →
This post was originally published on the Bookview Cafe blog in 2013. We humans love our boundaries. Between nations, between states, between property. So important to know where you end and I begin, not? But in history, maybe not so useful. When I was taking history classes, there was a tendency to teach historical periods and eras, as if the Plantagenets filed out in an orderly fashion one day, the Tudors clocked in, and everything–clothes, art, technology, politics–changed right then. But history isn’t a single timeline, there are huge overlaps,… Read more Today Flows from Yesterday, Without Labels →