30 Gold Nuggets from a Writing Conference
I spent this past weekend (May 1-3) at the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation, Inc., conference in Oklahoma City. This was my fourth trip to this conference, and each time it has been worthwhile. What I learned at OWFI 2014 is probably different from what others experienced, because we all attended different sessions and we are all […]
Mother’s Day Memento
On one of the spring vacations my family took, we were in a gift shop full of tchotchkes. Neither my husband nor I am fond of tchotchkes, and I was ready to move on. Nothing in the store looked interesting to me. But our children wanted to browse, to find some small mementoes to take […]
Getting To Yes . . . Or No . . . Or Any Decision
I’ve mentioned before that my son and I are almost complete opposites on the Myers-Briggs personality types. I am an ISTJ (or an INTJ, depending on the day). He is an ENFP. As a J (Judging type), I make decisions very quickly, often too quickly. Like most Ps (Perceiving type), my son has difficulty relinquishing […]
Fact and Fiction: A “First Hand” Description of San Francisco in April 1848
Henry Vizetelly, an English publisher who was in San Francisco at the time of the 1848 gold discovery, wrote a novel entitled Four Months Among the Gold-Finders in Alta California: Being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to the Gold Districts. He used the pseudonym J. Tyrwhitt Brooks. Fiction or not, the novel […]
Wallace Stegner: On the Teaching of Creative Writing
When I first began writing, I read lots of books on writing—many on the techniques of writing fiction, some on the writing life, and a few on grammar. But I didn’t read anything on teaching creative writing; that was too far beyond my ken. In the past seven years, I have drafted three novels, many […]
Easter Vigil Mass: Katholische Kirche?
One of the Easter vacations my family took when my kids were young was a trip to San Francisco. My husband was a Naval Reserve officer, and he got us into the Marines Memorial Club near Union Square downtown. It was a great location—convenient to many city attractions and to buses and cable cars. I […]
Hopping Down the Bunny Trail
As I’ve written before, we didn’t spend many holidays at home when my kids were growing up. We typically went to grandparents’ homes to celebrate. And that was true of Easter as well as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Plus, my children’s spring break was usually the week before or after Easter. So many years, we traveled […]
Waterfront Walks in Washington State
As I wrote recently, spring came earlier to Washington State this year than to Missouri. During my recent trip west, I spent two pleasant afternoons walking along waterfronts in Washington. The first was on a boardwalk on Liberty Bay in Poulsbo, Washington. I had a little time to kill, and needed to work off a […]
A Northern Digression: The Seattle Museum of History and Industry
On my recent trip to Seattle, I went to the Museum of History and Industry (called MOHAI by locals). And I realized how little I knew about the history of my native state. I took the requisite Washington State history class in the ninth grade—it was a quarter or a semester long, I forget which. […]
Spring This Year . . . Maybe Twice
I left Kansas City in mid-March for a two-week trip to Washington State. It was still winter in Kansas City when I left, barely any sign of green in the lawn, and only the beginnings of daffodil shoots. I arrived in Seattle to cherry trees in full bloom. The azaleas had blossoms, and even the […]