Blog Posts

  • A Month by the Pen

    Despite the eternal frustration that is slow postal delivery to my neighborhood in Salem, I really love getting snail mail.  There’s something really exciting about opening up the box and seeing a postcard or a letter that a digital inbox just doesn’t convey.  Maybe that makes me a temporal leftover, but apparently there are a…

  • Roma Eterna: Alternate Histories, and Missing Ones

    There are benefits to being stuck on the couch with a virus: my favorite is the permission to take a few consecutive hours to read, without feeling guilty about not doing something else (there’s always something else).  So today I finished Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg.  It’s been sitting on my to-read shelf for a…

  • “Saving Mr. Banks” and the enduring power of story

    I’m too late on the carousel to offer a fresh perspective on Saving Mr. Banks–a good many people have written reviews already, and I have no inclination or need to echo what’s been said repeatedly (but yes, fabulous acting by the entire cast start to finish, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy…

  • Hazard Pay, a library tale

    The following bit of fluff was written for my good friend and co-conspirator, Devlin, and rather giddily spun off our archaeological epistolary adventure.  The formal excuse for writing it was a writers’ group exercise in telling a story through letters or emails, but this particular pair of highly unusual library assistants prefers to leave each…

  • Why meeting your literary heroes matters

    All of us, at one point or another, have answered that question about having dinner with any three people from any point in history.  My answer is always Abigail Adams, Jane Austen, and some rotating third figure depending on my mood.  Sally Ride, maybe, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Princess Leia (what, you didn’t mean *Earth-bound*…