Women’s Fiction Day Giveaway!
Updating this post to announce the two Giveaway Winners! I did this the old-fashioned way and literally put names in a hat. Congratulations to Elizabeth A. Harvey and Twila Mason!! If both of you can go to my Contact page and leave me your addresses, I will send you your signed copies of Embers on…
Read MoreFirst Reads and First Ratings
I am so thrilled and honored that Embers on the Wind has been chosen as an Amazon First Reads book for the month of July! It’s all very new to have my book baby out in the world and a heady experience to see these…
Read MoreA Book Designer’s Kid Shares her Book’s Cover
My debut novel, which will be released to the world in July of this year—seven months from now—has a cover. A real one. Which I happen to love and whose image I open onto my computer screen several times a day just to gaze at it. The existence of this picture stirs up so many…
Read MoreIntegrating my Author and Therapist Selves
My father took my aspirations of being a novelist seriously from the start. His advice? “Get your first four chapters in, get your advance, and get to work.” Which was the way of the publishing world when he was chief art director of Viking Press back in the 60’s. I don’t remember Dad ever using…
Read MoreApartment #17D – An Ode
This is the site of my childhood. Notches on a closet doorway mark my growth. Outside, on the balcony, a dark stain on one brick betrays the spot where Teenage Me hastily stubbed out a cigarette as I saw my father approaching. This apartment has seen my first steps, heard and felt an ocean of…
Read MoreOn A Motherless Mother’s Day, Remembering to Heal and to Laugh
You wanted to know how I am—meaning since my loss, since my mother died. I say, “doing okay,” because sometimes I am okay. Sometimes I forget, and life feels normal. I say, “You know, it comes in waves,” meaning grief comes in waves, meaning sometimes it’s sharp and sometimes it’s dull and heavy and sometimes…
Read MorePrivilege, White and Otherwise: When your Dignity is Affirmed at the expense of Another’s
In Sunday’s Magazine section of the New York Times was an article about Alice Goffman, a young, white sociology professor. In the article, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Dr. Goffman shares a story about passing through a TSA checkpoint with a bag full of drug paraphernalia and becoming agitated—not at the thought of getting stopped—but simply because she…
Read MoreValentine’s Eve Remembrance
My father died of cancer seventeen years ago today: February 13th, 1995, the day before Valentine’s Day. We sat shiva for just three days before we felt him urging us to get back out into the world and live—on his behalf, on our own. I remember walking outside on February 17th and thinking what a lonely…
Read MoreGoodbye Hadiya: An Ode to the Lights in our Lives
Your daughter dreams big. Why shouldn’t she? She looks at the future as a wide open sea of possibility, a canvas to be filled with color or left full of open spaces as she sees fit. She trusts that the future will come and take whatever shape she gives it, so she can live in…
Read MoreThe Hunger Games, Corduroy and Me
Though I read The Hunger Games Trilogy, I have yet to see the movie—just because I haven’t found time. I’m thrilled that the reviews are so good, that all this anticipation won’t be for naught. I am also desperately relieved—unlike some on the Twittersphere—that a black child (the impossibly cute Amandla Stenberg, who is actually biracial) was cast…
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