people who live in ranch houses should be able to wash their own windows. or i should. that’s what i decided this morning, staring out at the bright, brassy day through windows streaked with dirt, rain, cobwebs, and something i like to think of as guano. This was on the outside, mind you. On the [...]
I wasn’t going to write about this, not yet, not today or tonight. Especially not this late at night, without forethought. But then I saw that my friend Amy Timberlake bravely posted: ”yeah, I miss my dad today,” and my heart got heavy with all that I haven’t acknowledged. There are so many reasons not [...]
About a month ago, I went to a workshop on creativity and prayer, facilitated by Vinita Hampton Wright. I’d been reading Vinita’s latest novel, Dwelling Places, and I couldn’t wait to spend the day with her. I love that novel, sentence by sentence–the way it’s shaped, the story it tells. This woman has something to [...]
On Mother’s Day, I had to post this poem by Billy Collins. I first heard Collins read this poem, driving through a blizzard in Michigan with my family. In a moment of raging, windy, white-out desperation, we turned on the radio, hoping for hope and a change in the weather, just over that hill, or [...]
I love it when friends send me recipes. Here is one from a friend who is an inspiration to me as an artist, writer, traveller, mother, woman—Janice Sorensen. (One of her presents to me for my wedding: a tamborine from Mexico, with flattened coke bottle caps for jangles. We jangle it still.) Check out Janice’s [...]
Last weekend I attended the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for the third time in approximately eight years–and it was, as always, an incredible event. This trip was made even more wonderful because I was able to spend a little more time with my writers’ group. (A shout out to group members Shayne Moore, [...]
Since December, the sheltered corner by our garage has been a vacant place—literally (except for the litter of leaves and dirt, and bags set out for recycling, and, in deeper cold, the heap of snow and ice, so quickly flecked with grit and grime.) But also, figuratively, in terms of the space that space takes [...]
Just returned this past Friday from the Illinois Reading Council Conference in Springfield, Illinois. This visit, I did not go to the incredible, state-of-the-art Abraham Lincoln Museum (Greg, M & T, and I did that last year over spring break.) But I did . . . catch up with other Illinois authors, like my good friend, [...]
today i started emptying our cluttered china cabinet, in preparation for filling it up again, only more so. It’s spring, or an illusion, here in Chicagoland. Out with the old, in with the new. Or in this case, in with the other old. Only child that I am, I inherited a fair amount of fragile [...]
three things I love: children’s literature, independent bookstores, and teachers and librarians who love the same, and who long, in spite of budget cuts, standardized testing, and technology fever, to expand the bound offerings (by this I mean books, of course) on their classroom shelves. a fourth thing I love: Anderson Bookshop’s Children’s Literature Breakfast, [...]