I’ve always had a particular affinity for teenagers. I’ve taught them for 20+ years as a college professor. When I was a young adult, my two half-siblings were in their teens. When my dear friend Deborah Tall was in the final stages of her life, I was honored to get to know her teen daughters who have turned, over many years, into friends. When I married, I acquired two beautiful girls on the cusp of […]
At dusk, several weeks ago, my family and I went on a picnic at the majestic Treman State Park. It is important to go to places at the wrong times, I think. My husband and I have been the only people on a volcano at high noon, and my family were once alone in a crumbling pyramid. One winter, long ago, I wandered through the ruins at Ephesus so unobserved I could have stolen a […]
The thunder clouds moved away and darkness fell over the drive-in theater. It seemed to me that the cars didn’t stop rolling in. I saw friends from every part of my life. It was the middle of a pandemic, and it was a party. I got to thank people who’d helped me along the way. My friend Bob said all the perfect things about The Likely World, including that it is sad. I read from the […]
Folks–it is a scary and wonderful thing to put a book into the world, and every reader who reads this book does me an honor. I’m so grateful to each of you who has chosen to give your attention to The Likely World. I can’t wait to hear what you think. A book is inert until it reacts with its audience. My fondest wish is that a reader somewhere will make something strange and unanticipated with The […]
When I first started writing The Likely World, I thought of it as a ‘speculative memoir.’ There are lots of words that already exist for novels which ghost into non-fiction in interesting ways: roman-a-clef, auto-fiction, and the humble autobiographical novel, but none of these words exactly described what I was trying to do which was to marry the speculative engine—‘what if’—to the creative process of memoir. If you’ve ever tried to write about your own life, you know interesting things […]
