From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: "When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know… it doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it […]
"… so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become…" This may not be the exact quote, but it’s more or less what I remember from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then, […]
I’ve been working on culinary writing today. Besides my cookbooks, I do short pieces for Relish Magazine, which is kind of like a food-only Parade, and has hands-down the two nicest, best-to-work-with magazine editors for whom I’ve ever written, Jill Melton and Candace Floyd … I’ve just finished, minus one recipe I still need to […]
1. The New Yorker cartoon showing the sullen college-age girl in seated in a window seat, cup of tea on the floor beside her, writing in a notebook balanced on her knees. Caption: "“Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.” 2. My late […]
“Happy Mother’s Day,” we say, as if it were that simple. It usually isn’t. Complex, ambivalent, contradictory, with more layers than a baklava: that begins, barely, to describe the relationship my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, and I have with each other. That it has at last grown simpler and less ambivalent in the last couple of […]
Sometimes it seems to me that everything reflects everything. Becoming transparent in the human sense, as I wrote about in the previous post, means that more light gets in, and out, in a spiritual, or maybe for some, emotional or psychological sense. Transparency in the culinary sense, as I understand it, is both like and […]
So I have this thing going on with the tendons on in my left foot. The details don’t matter; it’s getting better. What does matter is this: I see a doctor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, approximately a 55-minute drive from where I live in Vermont. DHMC, in my view, has a lot of stars in […]
This was the subject line on an email from Patti, who handles sales of my, my late husband’s, and my mother’s out-of-print books. Some we still have actual copies of; others we are set up (thanks to Patti) to offer digital copies of, for downloading. (My mother, BTW, is the children’s book writer Charlotte Zolotow. […]
