Little Brother as Mother’s Escort
My husband and I will celebrate our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary soon. We were married just days after my youngest brother turned ten. His role during our wedding was to escort my mother into the church. He wore a tuxedo and looked so cute, as little boys usually do when they wash up, comb their hair, […]
Writing Memoir: From Zero to Sixty in Half a Day
Although many posts on this blog are about my life, I don’t aspire to write a memoir. I’m interested in my life, but I don’t know how many other people would be. I might be able to tell amusing anecdotes, but I doubt I’d be able to develop an overall arc to my life—at least […]
First Wedding Present: Mixing Bowls
Sometime during the summer between our first and second years of law school, my husband-to-be and I decided to get married. We set the date for Thanksgiving weekend that autumn, back in my home town of Richland, Washington. Then we went about our graduate-student lives—going to classes, working on law review (me) and an international […]
The Rest of the Part-Time Story
A few months ago I wrote a post about my father telling me I should take “a nice part-time job” and how angry that made me. This post is a confession—I asked for that advice. Well, not for that advice specifically, but for any advice he could give me during a very difficult period in […]
Guest Post on A Writer of History
Last Thursday I had a guest post over on A Writer of History, which is an excellent blog on historical fiction written by M.K. Tod. I wrote about how I chose the time and place for my novels, Lead Me Home and Now I’m Found. A Writer of History has a lot to offer both […]
Haunting Book: The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson
My last review of a haunting book for 2016 is of The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson. Ms. Simonson is the author of one of my favorite books of the last decade, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, published in 2010. Her second novel, The Summer Before the War, is good, but it doesn’t rise to […]
History by Non-Historians: First-Hand Accounts by Gold Rush Prospectors
Writers of historical fiction look for first-hand accounts of the time to give their stories depth and verisimilitude. I wrote an earlier post about a book purportedly by a Gold Rush prospector, California: Four Months Among the Gold-Finders in California; Being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to the Gold Districts, by J. […]
Haunting Book: The Lake House, by Kate Morton
The Lake House was another book I read this past year that played with my sense of time and intrigued me from both a writer’s and a reader’s perspective. The story in this novel takes place in three different time periods—in 2003 London detective Sadie Sparrow investigates a cold case while on leave at her […]
Chihuly Garden and Glass Gallery
I’ve done a fair amount of sightseeing in Seattle, but I’d never been to the Chihuly Garden and Glass Gallery until a trip this autumn. The gallery and gardens sit under the Space Needle, but somehow I’d always passed them by. This time, I made a special visit just to see them. I was disappointed […]
Haunting Book: The Bookseller, by Cynthia Swanson
Like A Murder in Time, The Bookseller haunted me because of how the novel deals with time and reality, though The Bookseller is not a time travel story. In this debut novel by Cynthia Swanson, the protagonist, Kitty Miller, owns an independent bookstore in the early 1960s, together with her friend Frieda. Kitty lives alone […]