Blog

I started writing my story because of silence, because of shouting and the sound of broken glass, and my mother’s face in the morning, sometimes marked by the night before, sometimes turned away to show how truly hurt she was. Because of the empty bottles on the dining room table, the glasses half-filled, the sense that whatever had happened was terrible, a threat to happiness. That happiness was the talk at dinner with my parents telling stories, their laughter, and their devotion to the creative work that seemed the only choice in a world marked by greed and war, in a world that watched the Vietnam War rage on, in a world where men in suits, a certain suit, decided, napalm or more dead soldiers? I started writing my stories out of love, fear, and anger. Someone needed to tell the truth, to illuminate the dim corners of the past, my father’s broken childhood, my mother’s ambition thwarted by those who believed a woman with three children and a husband had no business designing houses.

Read More

Reading Sally Mann’s book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, presents an argument for persistence, the rejection of fortune for the sake of owning your vision and a helpful chapter on rejection, a word most of us hate but also accept as the unwanted payment for effort. Once I submitted a novel that was returned so quickly, I imagined throwing it over a wall and having it immediately tossed back. Yes, it was years of effort sent packing within a matter of days. Did that stop me? No. Neither did the reaction of my parents when I summoned them to listen to my first story that began, “They were like two ships passing in the night. Her eyes were velvet blue, and her cheeks were the color of roses.” I had discovered clichés and was captivated by language. They listened, sighed, left halfway through with a single remark, “How terrible.”

Read More

My only child is becoming a father in a few weeks. His stepfather has eight grandchildren. When we married, they were traumatized teenagers who had little use for a substitute mother, their own mother close to death from drugs and drinking. She’s still alive. Despite a certain lack of understanding what it means to be an adult; my husband is an adored grandfather. I, on the other hand, suggested they call me, “Whose that lady?” when he asked what name I would choose as their step grandmother. Yes, I wish them happy lives and support his relationship with them, but I saw myself as an adult friend, a resource in case of crisis.

Read More