Have you ever thought you were done? And then you weren’t? Yesterday, I thought, was my last day of this never-ending summer quarter at school. I woke up early, eager to get to the day. I took a shower, fed the critters, and shocked the coffee shop I go to by getting there two hours before… Read more
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Not too long ago, I was correcting papers and wishing the writers would not be so inventive with their sentence structures and vocabulary. I would see something with a phrase, a comma, or an unfamiliar word like ‘thalassemia’ and sigh. I had an prickly sense that something was off but wasn’t strong enough on the structure to… Read more
This Wednesday, I need to pause the blog while I madly craft a query letter, hoping to be chosen and learning from the jump into the unknown. If you have a book of your own to pitch, check out Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars. It’s quite the writing adventure she has put together. I’ll let you… Read more
On Sunday, I drove across the Cascade Mountains to sunny Yakima for a three day teaching conference. In this city my grandparents once called home, I let the sun melt away my everyday stresses and felt my curiosity perk up. While strolling the neighborhood, I discovered churches with large blocks of dark stone rising above the city… Read more
When I was a teenager, working in the garden numbed my brain with boredom. I could not understand how my mother spent hours and days pulling weeds and clipping dead branches. I loved the beauty of the place and went to the roses to talk to her often, but I could only do the work… Read more
Every summer about this time, I remember the libraries have programs for reading with prizes to encourage reading. My mom tells me I began doing this in the card catalog days of my grade school years, and most summers I’ve remembered to sign my kids up before the end of July. (The libraries are always generous and let… Read more
I have two places to find books when I want to know what to read next. It was strange to me that in those two separate places I found first Moriarty and then Holmes, two books I adored. 1. My Mother’s Kindle A while back, my six-year-old dropped my electronic book. This is what I… Read more
Jessica Lewis, the trombone soloist in our band, reminds me of Marci Kobayashi-Smith, my good friend in high school. Jessica is tall, with cropped dark hair and skin like the color of vanilla ice cream. She plays in the toasty church where we practice, wearing a knit hat in a quirk that Marci did not have but I wouldn’t… Read more