Nonfiction, Memoir, Fabulist Fiction & Poetry
I don’t know where the old tin came from. Maybe it held cookies once upon a time, a gift to my parents. I suspect it was found in the old house when they first moved in. (A lot of things were left behind by… Continue Reading “Breathing the Past”
It wasn’t my intention to be absent from this blog for so long, but I was waylaid by a vestibular migraine, something I’ve experienced most of my life, but was actually diagnosed last April. For those who don’t know (and who would, unless they… Continue Reading “Red Letter Day”
Especially when you wrote it! Just had to share the smiling faces of my friends at Ooligan Press when they unboxed copies of ELEPHANT SPEAK the other day. I can’t speak more highly of their great team. We are exactly five weeks out from launch, and… Continue Reading “Happiness is a Warm Paperback”
I can’t remember ever seeing my grandmother smile. This studio portrait, taken God knows when, is the closest she comes to it. As a child, I didn’t understand her lack of smiles and (I confess) took it personally. (I was an emotional, empathetic, introvert;… Continue Reading “Where is Grandma’s smile?”
So begins the gothic novel Rebecca, written in 1938 by Dame Daphne du Maurier. My own version might begin, “Last night I dreamt of the house in Clifton Park.” The old farmhouse on Plant Road wasn’t much to look at when my parents purchased… Continue Reading ““Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.””
Hello, all! I wanted to let you know that I’ve started an adjunct site to this one, focused entirely on elephants and the stories behind my book The Man Who Loved Elephants: 30 Years at Oregon’s Washington Park Zoo, which is being offered to publishers… Continue Reading “Where To Go For Elephants”
A certain hill looms large in my memories, although it wasn’t particularly large itself. The yard behind the house in Clifton Park, NY where I grew up (we had yards back then, rather than manicured lawns) was wide enough to contain a swing-set and a clothesline… Continue Reading “A Hill Runs Through It”