ONE YEAR AND ONE WEEK ago, my lifelong dream of being a published author finally came true! My debut novel, The Walled Garden, entered the world, kicking off an amazing year of opportunities and encounters I could never have imagined. I want to highlight some of them here, and to say thank [...]
I JUST GOT BACK from a walk that perfectly captured this cold, wet spring we've been having, and I keep thinking about these lines from one of my favorite Robert Frost poems (Two Tramps in Mud Time): The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with [...]
IT'S JANUARY, AND if there’s a better month for snuggling inside with a good book and a cup of tea, I don’t know what it is! I’ve recently been inspired to think about my favorite books of last year in terms of Oscar award categories by the fabulous Elsie @ Tea and [...]
I'M FINDING IT REALLY DIFFICULT to gather my thoughts about England, a place I’ve been in love with since I saw Mary Poppins when I was six years old. During the pandemic, when I was feeling nostalgic for all the trips I wasn’t taking, I tried to find the journal from my [...]
“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 [...]