Researching an Oregon Parsonage
Many of the scenes in my current work-in-progress take place in a Methodist parsonage in Albany, Oregon. The minister, his wife, and their young daughter live there in 1867. Albany in 1867 was a small town, though it was the county seat of Linn County, Oregon. I envisioned a small parsonage—a few rooms on the […]
My Gratitude Journal This Thanksgiving
I’ve written before about the journal I have kept for the past twenty years. About two years ago, sometime after the pandemic started, I decided to add a paragraph each day listing things I was grateful for. I’d read about the healing powers of keeping a gratitude journal, and this was my nod to the […]
A Story That’s Fun To Tell: My Mother and the Ballard Locks
When my parents lived in Bellevue, Washington, in the 1980s, they owned a small cabin cruiser. I don’t recall much about the boat, and I never went out in it. They mostly sailed on Lake Washington, but occasionally, then took it into Puget Sound and up into the San Juan Islands. To get from Lake […]
Teaching My Kids to Drive
I wrote recently about my own experience learning to drive. I don’t remember that being a contentious time with my father, though starting to drive a manual transmission took a bit of doing. But teaching my kids to drive? That was harrowing. My son, poor kid, as the oldest, had the worst of it. We […]
My Middlebury Trash Can
When I moved onto campus at Middlebury College in the fall of 1973, I shipped a trunkful of belongings ahead of me. Then, on the plane with me before Freshman Week, I brought two suitcases, a carry-on, and a guitar case. But I didn’t bring a wastepaper can, and the dorm did not issue such […]
Docks and Locks in 19th Century Oregon City
In my novels, starting with Now I’m Found, which was set in 1848-50, I show steamboats traveling the Willamette River. Steamboats began plying the waters of the lower Willamette in 1850. However, the boats had to stop at the Willamette Falls in Oregon City, which were too high for boats to navigate. As a result, […]
A Rite of Passage: Learning To Drive
One of the pitfalls of skipping kindergarten was that I couldn’t get my driver’s license until several months to more than a year after all my high-school friends. I didn’t turn fifteen and a half (the age for getting a learner’s permit in Washington State at the time) until October 1971, when I was a […]
My 1000th Blog Post and Canadian Thanksgiving
I predicted in January of this year, on the tenth anniversary of this blog, that I would hit my 1000th post later in 2022. Well, here I am—WordPress tells me that this post is the thousandth. We are two days past the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday—the older cousin of the U.S. Thanksgiving. I’ve decided to use […]
SAFE THUS FAR: A 2022 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award Finalist!
My latest published novel, Safe Thus Far, was a finalist for the 2022 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. Several of my novels have been nominees for the award in earlier years, and I was pleased that this book was a finalist. My novel was in good company. The winner of this year’s Thorpe Menn Literary […]
Time Is Relative: I’m One Degree of Separation from 1867
Recently I was doing more research for my current work-in-progress the is set in 1867. (Yes, it’s drafted. Yes, I’m heavily into editing. And yes, I’m still researching arcane issues.) I came across a tidbit of information I hadn’t focused on before, and it got me thinking about how 1867 wasn’t that long ago, at […]