Oregon City: End of the Trail
If the emigrants on the Oregon Trail were fortunate, they reached Oregon City in the Willamette Valley sometime in October – about six months after they began their journey from what was then the United States. The dangers of their trek continued even through the last weeks, when the travelers had to choose between rafting […]
Haunting Book: The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian
The second of the haunting books in my October series is The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian. This novel is set in two time periods – the narrator lives in current times, and her grandparents met and fell in love during the Armenian Genocide in World War I. Like all the books in my “haunting” […]
Breakfast Date: Frank’s of Parkville and English Landing Park
For a year or two now, my husband has been trying to get me to go out to breakfast with him at Frank’s Restaurant in Parkville, MO, not too far from our home. On Saturday, September 29, it finally happened. Our breakfast date was possible because Al didn’t have to row that morning, which is […]
Haunting Books: The Hunger Games Trilogy
In the past few months I’ve read several books that have continued to haunt me weeks after I turned the last page. So on Wednesdays in October (the traditional month for haunting), I’ll be posting about some of these books. None of the books I’ll write about is a horror book per se. I don’t […]
Plotting a Novel – Try this for NaNoWriMo
I wish I knew more about plotting a novel. It’s one of the reasons I kick myself for not beginning my writing career earlier in life. If I’d spent my twenties starving in a garret as a writer, I’d be through the worst of the learning curve now. I’d have finished the 10,000 hours of […]
Middlebury College: Teaching Maturity Along with Liberal Arts
I’ve often said that the best thing my parents ever did for me was to send me 3,000 miles away from home. At age 17, I went from home in Washington State to Middlebury College in Vermont. And I grew up very quickly. I hadn’t liked myself very well in high school. I was bookish […]
You Know Your Children Are Grown When . . .
1. You find a long list of alcoholic beverages in your car in your son’s handwriting, and realize there’s nothing you can (or should) say to him, because he’s thirty years old, and he was on a liquor store run for his grandmother. 2. Your daughter tells you not to get glasses that make you […]
Whitman Mission
I mentioned in an earlier post that I wrestled with whether to set my Oregon Trail novel in 1847 or 1848. I decided on 1847, because I wanted my characters to stop at the Whitman Mission. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, early pioneers to the Oregon Territory, were killed by Cayuse Indians in November 1847, so […]
Grandpa and the Grandchildren’s Gallery
This past weekend we buried my father-in-law. He was the first grandparent my children and their cousins lost. As the family mourned, of course, we told our stories. The four cousins – my son and daughter, and my nephew and niece – were close in age, born between 1978 and 1985. All four are now […]
Central Planning . . . or Planning Central
I’ve written before about my planning abilities. They are being severely taxed this week, as we gather the family for my father-in-law’s funeral. Throughout the week, we are coordinating the arrival at the Kansas City airport of my two adult children, and my husband’s sister and her husband, cousin, niece and her husband (with two […]