This year’s jolting events should make us stop and think. All of us, right and left. It has jolted me enough that this blog has gone silent these last weeks, and perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s time to put down the drums we’ve been beating and take a good hard look at where they’ve […]
We enter Alice Hoffman’s Illumination Night through the eyes of Simon, stretching to gaze out of his window on a hot summer morning. Simple details give us Simon’s four-year-old world—his room, his mother in the kitchen, his father out […]
Inviting you to Saturday, October 8 11AM PDT, 2PM EDT Libraries across the nation will join in a webcast introducing their local indie authors (authors who self-publish or publish through small presses) I will be joining authors from the Skagit Valley on the Mount Vernon Library panel Click here for the link For those of […]
Erin Kelly opens THE POISON TREE with a phone call that dries the saliva in the protagonist’s mouth and sends her driving across a frozen London in her pajamas and boots. We do not know who she is except that she has done terrible things for her family and the phone call is driving […]
Browsing through my notes, I came across this dialogue exercise I wrote for a class many years ago. It’s not nearly the level of Tony Fuhrman’s poem, but it seems singularly appropriate to the level of social and political scene today. […]
Every time we awake to another mass shooting, we grow a little more numb, a little less alive. What will it take to shake us out of this ever more detached state of being? Toni Fuhrman’s poem, While I Slept, did that for me […]
A naked old man found wandering through Central Park turns out to be the Headmaster of a Vermont elite prep school. How can this be? How can such a man come to this? It violates every belief we carry about the inhabitants of that world. The Headmaster’s Wife, weaves a tale of obsession, grief and […]
“In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.” With those words, Vianne Rossignol opens the story of her life, and the lives of her loved ones, during the occupation of France. Rossingnol means ‘nightingale” in French, and in the end Vianne recognizes herself in that […]
Whether you believe in ghosts or believe, as this author does, in the power of the imagination to bring to life the unacknowledged legacies of the past to haunt the present, Second Glance is, despite some weaknesses, a thought provoking read. In this story, the ghosts are real, and though I was willing to suspend my […]
Welcome, Toni, You and I met in Ann Arbor in the 70s, so we have a long history as fellow writers. I’d like you to talk about your writing background—when you began to write, where you get your ideas, how you would describe your style of writing, and what authors have inspired you. Also […]
My greatest aspiration as an author is to carry readers inside the social turmoil of our times and thereby dissolve the bitter cultural divisions that plague the nation. Ann Patchett is therefore one of my favorite authors, for she explores the bonds that join us. Bel Canto is her most famous example, but The Magician’s […]
World War II scattered as many lives as it destroyed, leaving another generation to piece together their lost and buried pasts. Diane Armstrong’s Winter Journey is one such story and a gripping one, but it is far more than the tale of one woman’s search for her past. It’s a story that should send shivers […]
Judith Kirscht lives and works in the beautiful Puget Sound area. She is the author of four published works of fiction with more to come soon!
