Pickle Me This

I was late to Margaret Drabble, unsurprisingly, since she started publishing novels almost twenty years before I was born, and it was only when I was living in Japan in my 20s that I fell under their spell, battered copies of her Penguin paperbacks w...

I’ve learned a lot from Emma Straub about the kind of books I want to write—her novel The Vacationers was the last book I finished reading before I sat down to begin my first novel, Mitzi Bytes, in 2014—and this is because hers are also the k...

“Remembering my grip on her arms, hurting her, wanting to shake her, hard, so she would stop being drunk—wipe her face, so she could participate like the rest of us. Participate, like all of us. Didn’t she get it? We didn’t want to be here eith...

The windows are open and so’s that door, flung open wide to all the GREEN of the forest just beyond my kitchen, home to cardinals, sparrows, very loud robins, and sometimes finches and a ruby throated kinglet, among others. (Can you tell that I recen...

I wrote this last Wednesday, and it appears in my latest ENTHUSIASMS newsletter. You can subscribe to ENTHUSIASMS