Stories
How to Research a Book
“I’ve just spent a term teaching first-year writing based foundationally on primary source digital archive,” reads an email I got recently, “and I loved seeing my students discover that writing was much more interesting when they had research that was personally interesting to them. “What does the research process look like for you, and when […]
Has the Pandemic Changed the Way We Write? A Librarian Wants to Know
It was a stellar panel. Online, of course, at the Library Journal Day of Dialogue. Not that my personal zoom square was stellar, since I’d looked at the weather forecast that morning and seen that the day was supposed to be cloudy. My father-in-law was a meteorologist so I trusted the forecast, and didn’t move […]
Charlotte Brontë turns 205
Charlotte Brontë was born on this day in 1816. It’s also the 95th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, who opened her historic eyes on April 21, 1926. That makes Charlotte exactly 110 years older than the queen. But who seems the most modern? Every time I re-read Charlotte Brontë’s best book, Jane Eyre, I think I’m finally […]
Baseball Player Harry Fisher: He Coulda Been A Contender
Harry Fisher won one game in the big leagues of baseball, pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the summer of 1952. That makes him an asterisk in sports history. But of course he was much more than that, and a few years ago, I wrote about Harry’s baseball career in an e-book for The Toronto Star. […]
A Year Into the Pandemic. Or 13 Months. Whatever.
Everyone has been writing about the anniversary. Here we are, marking a year of lockdown from the pandemic—more or less. Given that it’s thirteen months, can we say I’ve developed a small case of procrastination? That’s part of what I’ve been thinking about lately: that the lockdown is bringing out things we don’t like about […]
A Year of Living Organizationally. Or–Ann Patchett
When the pandemic shutdown started more than a year ago now, I hoped to come out of it with two new novels and a well-organized house. It turns out the novels are the easy part. The decluttering is taking forever–not least because in the middle of it, I sat down to read a personal history piece […]
Movie Review: The Mauritanian – 2
Critics praise The Mauritanian but call it a throwback, its cast better than the script. Audiences like it more than the critics, maybe because it’s the type of film that went missing from theatres even before the lockdown: an intelligent drama for adults. The film tells the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held without […]
Movie Review: The Mauritanian – 1
It’s a bad reason for watching a film: I was charmed by Jody Foster’s blurted acceptance of her best supporting actress award at the Golden Globes for The Mauritanian. “Are you kidding me?” There’s also the fact my husband went to Guantánamo on a media tour in August, 2002, eleven days after the Mauritanian in question, […]
How Do We Really Spend Our Days?
I’ve been thinking lately about how we spend our days. Not what we write about on social media: the highlight reel, heavily edited. Instead I’m thinking about the minute-by-minute unfolding of our lives from the time we fumble off the alarm in the morning to the time we set it at night, and how that […]
Advice to the Lovelorn, 1940s Style
Working through the boxes in our attic, doing a purge, I came across several letters written in the mid-1940s by my mother’s Aunt Peggie. I only have one side of the correspondence, but from the sounds of it, my mother often wrote letters to her aunt complaining about the lack of good men. Also about […]
From Soup to Nuts Cake: Recipes from the 1960s
I think the cookbook comes from the early Sixties, but there’s no date inside. The Moffat cookbook, given away when people bought new stoves. It belonged to my mother, who died Before, as I think of it now. Long Before, but I’m doing a household purge that starts with a couple of boxes of her stuff that […]
Review(s): Janet Malcolm’s Personal History and A Book I Won’t Read
I was cleaning behind a bookcase the other day and came across an old New Yorker dated October 29, 2018. Well, it’s a heavy bookcase and it doesn’t get moved that often, she said defensively. In it was an article by staff writer Janet Malcolm, a personal history called Six Glimpses of the Past in which she […]
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