Nothing could prevent Doris from seizing that moment in the surf at Hawaii when she reared high in the air, arms thrown back and chin lifted, exulting in her power to do what she wanted.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
Writers, French Women and French Bookstores
We have an obligation to be fearless, never leaving out “the good parts,” those hidden parts of lives that are of most interest to all of us: it is in “the good parts” that the essence of a human life is often revealed.
The Blue Box Debuts: First Public Reading!
There are moments in life that are so precious, so sweet, that years later they still ring like a set of silver chimes.
Kicking Against The Pricks
My mother wisely warned me many times against “kicking against the pricks,” by which she meant the inevitable barriers we face in life, not the male appendage. She would have been horrified by that association.
Twin These Houses — The Blue Box
Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.
Digging Up The Bones 2 — The Blue Box
This morning I found a faded copy of a newspaper photo, certainly from the old Society Page of a Richmond Virginia daily, showing a group of three young people, two men and a woman, marching down Monument Avenue in that city, the broad magisterial artery where the greats of the Confederacy are memorialized in huge marble statues.
On The Blue Box
The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare.
Digging Up The Bones – The Blue Box
As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself.
Mother Mary — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
She remains for me a difficult and challenging example of what a woman of character who makes good choices can become.
Naming Names — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
I realized today…that I never heard anyone in my family or outside of it mention my material grandmother, Sallie Montague Lefroy. This seems particularly strange since it seems I was named for her—seems because no one ever mentioned that either, but since we are both called Sallie Montague, it seems likely that I was named for her—and I am the only one of five siblings given a name from my mother’s family rather than my father’s.