“SUMMER AFTERNOON—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,” wrote Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady. It’s a perfect summer afternoon here in the Northwest—FINALLY—after the rainiest June ever, and I’m in a mood to appreciate it. Wait—I’m wrong! I just [...]
THE WAY THE WORLD HAS BEEN these last few years, it’s all too easy to find ourselves feeling whipsawed by events, not only in the broader world, but sometimes within our own personal worlds as well. I even feel whipsawed by the weather—in typical PNW summer fashion here, after being a [...]
GRAB A TALL GLASS of iced tea (or your favorite wine) and head for your lounge chair! Let’s talk about our favorite dreamy summer reads, the books we return to again and again because they give us that indefinable feeling of summer. Not too surprisingly, given my Anglophilic leanings, many of my [...]
THE LONG-AWAITED DEBUT of The Walled Garden finally arrived last Tuesday, May 17, and it was a wonderful day! To think that the book that I’ve been working on for more than 15 years was finally going out into the world to find its readers was absolutely thrilling. (And okay, I’ll admit it: [...]
I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: this is not the post I planned to write today! It breaks all my self-imposed rules for this blog: being overly self-revelatory, expressing less than positive feelings, and blowing (way) past my word count. It began as a guest post for another blog, took on [...]
THOUGH T.S. ELIOT FAMOUSLY wrote in The Wasteland that “April is the cruellest month,” when April finally rolls around here in the Northwest with its changeable weather and long-awaited flowers, I’m usually looking for a slightly more hopeful take on it. I’ve written before about my joy in seasonal reading and, this time [...]
AH, SPRING! THIS TIME of year, I walk around with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines beating in my head: Nothing is so beautiful as Spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush . . . Though, as a gardener, I always think that if Hopkins had [...]
IT FEELS LIKE the first day of spring here—temps in the 60s and the world finally beginning to wake to COLOR. My camellias are starting to bloom in that gorgeous coral-pink shade I love, and I’m excited to say that The Walled Garden comes out eight weeks from now! You’ll recall my delight [...]
IT'S A GRAY and chilly March day, good for curling up inside with cats and multiple cups of tea. As my pub date grows closer (May 17th!), I’m starting to see some early reviews of The Walled Garden. One of them referred to my protagonist, Lucy Silver, as the “young detective,” which [...]
“MIDWINTER SPRING IS its own season,” writes T.S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” one of The Four Quartets. “Sempiternal, though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time between pole and tropic.” I’ve always loved that description of “midwinter spring.” I’ve been thinking of it today because it’s the perfect midwinter spring day [...]