About the author
Stories for Social Change in "Flight Behavior" & "The Line"
In early October, on the eve of the first Presidential debate, the social justice-focused Sojourners presented a documentary it had produced about poverty in America. The Line—the title a nod to both the statistical marker of “official” poverty, as well as the invisible fences between the “haves” and “have nots”—profiled four Americans who help to comprise the approximately 46 million people who live...
Ambiance: Where Details Are Everything
When I told my book club – an international group of women – that the “general themes” of the book we were reading were universal, my thoughts were met with a few raised eyebrows. It was the Egyptian novel The Yacoubian Building, and Egypt had been in the news with increasing frequency. I argued that a good story takes the severity or exactness of particulars and somehow finagles into the reader’s mind a fa...
The Sense of Redemption
At the creative writing center where I volunteer, we engage children in writing fiction by presenting them with four basic tenets of a story: a main character, a sidekick, the main character’s greatest wish, and his or her biggest problem. The children compose the beginning of the story as a group and then create their own endings and grapple with how they want to solve the character’s problem. Without knowing it...
And Then Came Sebastian Barry
As a young girl, my fictitious heroine was Anastasia Krupnik, the star of Lois Lowry’s acclaimed (and sometimes-banned) series of Anastasia books. Despite Anastasia’s comparatively more remarkable life – her father, a poet; her mother, an artist; a childhood spent in Cambridge at Harvard’s doorstep before a move to the suburbs – she and I held a desire in common: a constant wish to have something “interes...
Cat's Eye
Oh, Margaret Atwood, how could you have known – approximately 20 years before the advent of Facebook – that there would one day be a place (a cyber place, no less!) where ordinary people eagerly test their hypotheses about long-lost friends and acquaintances who once would have been relegated only to an aged yearbook or photo album? In light of our obsession with reconnecting with everyone from every facet of our...
