The second and final excerpt from my journal about meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys in April, 2000, this time about the betrayal of Anne Frank. That’s her photo above. I’ve written a number of pieces about the issue lately, and a link at the bottom of this page will take you to the first. […]
Below is an excerpt from my journal of April, 2000, about my meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys, who told me that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed to the Nazis by a man named Willem van Maaren. I’ve written about her claim over the past couple of weeks, starting here. This has led to […]
I’ve been taking long and winding roads in my reading lately, and as I wrote last week, the latest one brought me back to the name of the man I was told had betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis. A Dutch writer told me his name, and I’d written it in a journal I kept […]
When I was in Amsterdam researching my third novel, a writer who had known Otto Frank told me that in 1963 he’d found out who had betrayed his family, including his daughter Anne Frank, to the Nazis. I wasn’t expecting to hear this and was startled that the writer, Mies Bouhuys, had brought it up, […]
More than a year before the Second World War ended, the Dutch government in exile did a very smart thing. The minister of arts and sciences went on the clandestine Radio Oranje to ask people throughout the country to preserve their diaries and papers about everyday life during the war, documents that detailed their struggle […]
That’s Jessie Barfoot looking away from us on the new cover of my third novel, The Corner Garden. I love the designer’s portrayal of Jesse, and I’m launching the revamped cover today with a story about what inspired the book. Jesse narrates the novel, and she introduces herself by saying, “I think I’ll call myself Gretel […]
I was bored, and actually had some questions, so I logged onto the AI model ChatGPT. Here’s our conversation, edited for length. My novel Time Squared from 2021 is being pirated. Can you find any pirate sites, including Reddits and sub-Reddits, where the novel is being offered for free download? I’m sorry to hear that […]
The Vikings were mostly younger sons, footloose men whose older brothers were heir to the family farms in Scandinavia, and whose poverty left them with a tendency to pillage. The first Vikings banded together in about the year 900 to man speedy boats built by prosperous local chieftains who gave them a cut of the […]
Today I’m celebrating the lovely new cover on my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales—and reflecting on the increasingly fraught idea of travel in a climate-changed world. I’ve got a new novel out this fall. Far Creek Road is set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and will be marketed as historical fiction. Apparently […]
She was born Karen Dinesen in 1885, although she used different names and lived in vastly different places throughout her life. Tanne, Tania, Isak Dinesen was brought up on her family’s estate in Denmark, went to Switzerland and France for her education, then moved to a coffee farm in British East Africa with her aristocratic […]
I wrote recently about falling down a Scandinavian rabbit hole. In fact, I’ve been reading my way into multiple burrows, picking up old books and thinking about once-famous lives and adventures, some of them wounded and raw. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Swedish Canadian ornithologist and writer. Her cousin Karen Blixen—pen name, Isak Dinesen, the […]
I fell down a rabbit hole after reading Merilyn Simonds’ excellent biography, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay. It tells the story of a Swedish Canadian woman, an aristocrat who led a life of unprecedented twists and turns. She married her White Russian husband while working as a Red Cross nurse […]