If I have been able to touch one of them with stories that mean so much to me, I will feel my long years of work as a writer are worthwhile.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
Greatauthoritis
A novel about the struggles the individual always faces in an engaged life… and a novel based on a lived life but moving beyond autobiography into art.
What It Takes to Be a Writer
Abandon professionalism. Hard work, always, is essential, but the notion that there is such a thing as “success”—a large audience, critical acclaim, and money—is, for nearly all of us, a delusion.
Wild West Women
The ur-stories of the West are still ours to tell, not the stories of whores or missionaries, but of buffalo-killers who gut and skin their prey.
Mister Jackson
Is there any reason to hope that we humans can also “abandon our usual strategies and learn something new and unexpected?”
How to Write
As my biography of Doris Duke continues to simmer in the editing vats at Farrar, Straus, I must for my salvation begin to write—again.
Spring Is like a Perhaps Hand in the Window
Healing, for me, comes in the spectacle of nature shifting into another key… and, always, in books.
Spring, and the Gift of a Teacher
What a long way we have come, all of us who have been writing now for decades, published and unpublished, read and unread.
Upcoming Workshop: “When Words Really Matter”
For words really to matter, they must illuminate a larger reality than the inevitably small perimeters of our daily lives.
Snow
I think we women writers sometimes scant the snow, and the weather in general, in favor of the human characters that obsess us.