“Fluttering at the Margins”

At last!  My piece, “Fluttering at the Margins,” is up on HER KIND, A BLOG POWERED BY VIDA: WOMEN IN LITERARY ARTS.  It’s about twins and bats and writing and parenting and biography and Facebook and becoming an essayist and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

It’s the piece I read at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts last month:

Me reading at VCCA. Costarring: CHEEZ-ITS!  (Photo by Mary Akers.)

Click here to

Read Full Post »

Intellectual puttering

Around three o’clock this afternoon I posted a question on Facebook:

How long CAN you fool around on the Internet before settling down to work?

The answer is (unsurprisingly) quite a while.

At first I was groaning that I had spent so much time poking around online, but then I decided to rename this rudderless surfing “intellectual puttering.”  I haven’t done any formal reading or research, but I’ve learned quite a lot of stuff.  For example:

• Goodreads has a lovely list of books about shipwrecks.  I’m interested in shipwrecks and plan to read the most accurate version of The Swiss Family Robinson that I can find (not one of the highly-abridged children’s versions), as well as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in the very near future.

• In other news, I also learned that conjoined twins Chang and Eng married a pair of sisters and, evidently, had quite a lot of

Read Full Post »

Forthcoming work!

I’ve been working working working so hard lately that I haven’t had time to write a post.  However, some of my earlier hard work has paid off!

Later this month I’ll have an essay in Propeller.  Meanwhile, you can read these excellent offerings from their fall issue:

• Jessica Machado on rewatching the movie St. Elmo’s Fire
• Emily Burns Morgan on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on her Columbian honeymoon or, from their summer issue,
• Mary Rechner’s essay “Why I Hate Food,” which led me to wonder what Virginia Woolf would order at the Whole Foods take-out counter.

St. Elmo’s Fire. Did we ever really wear anything even close to that? From propellermag.com.

Then, in November,

Read Full Post »