I have been blogging since I returned from Zimbabwe last May, but I have been terribly erratic. This is my first post since early December. As the world slipped quietly into the 21st century’s second decade, I promised myself I would be more...
Sports Mania
I find myself living in a town that has, over the last couple of months, been hyper-afflicted with football frenzy. “Our” football team, that of the local university where I teach—okay, yes, the Ducks—is, at the moment of this writing, #1 in the...
A Broken World
Last night, while the Democrats were being pummeled, I went to hear Terry Tempest Williams speak. She talked about studying the art of mosaics in Italy, about the complicated communication skills of prairie dogs and of how ruthlessly they’ve been...
Vive les Geeks
Last week we visited our son Ben at college and took him to lunch with some of his friends. He was a live wire of energy. “Mom,” he said as we walked to the restaurant, “I just love vector calculus.” There was not a trace of irony in his...
Stalking Jonathan Franzen
Now that Jonathan Franzen’s glasses have been stolen, it is time for me to make a confession. A few weeks ago, when I was deeply immersed in reading Freedom, I began stalking Jonathan Franzen. Well, I wasn’t breaking any laws to do so. I wasn’t...
Googling Characters
I have always taken great pleasure in naming my fictional characters. The act of naming them goes a long way in bringing them to life. In the service of this I have collected several “name your baby” books that I often consult in the process. I...
End of Summer
When I was in elementary school we were routinely asked in early March to talk about “signs of spring.” We listed them on the blackboard; we were sent out to the playground to find them; we were assigned to assemble Signs of Spring collections at...
Faulkner on Writing a Novel
“Writing a novel is like trying to knock together a chicken coop in the middle of a hurricane.” William Faulkner How true, true, true. Trying to manage all the disparate parts. Things flying here and there, entering and disappearing...
Community
About ten days ago I returned from one of my very favorites places: the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an annual writers conference that takes place near Lake Tahoe in California. The physical locale is one of unparalleled beauty—snow-dappled...
Controlling the World
A couple of months ago I heard a Terry Gross interview with Judith Shulevitz, whose book The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, discusses the history of the Sabbath and her own attempts to observe it within the context of a...