I feel all Little House in the Big Woods-ish as I dig up the ugly area right off the street in front of my house and replace the spotty grass with steppables. Steppables! Such delicate leaves and interesting shapes. A blogger called one of the plants I bought an “iddy biddy ferny thingie,” which gives you the
Big Ma Nature turns off the faucet fast around here! Last week, some of the Vermont College MFA faculty had a writing retreat at Canon Beach, and it rained on us almost every day–I got soaked twice. Today, I’m watering my new garden, fussing over those poor tender greenlings looking limp and helpless in the
I think I’m addicted to Ethiopia Reads. How can I resist with this kind of email popping into my life? “Hi we are Sami Phelps and Anna Hilterbrand, two 11 year olds who have been fundraising for Ethiopia Reads. The first thing we did to raise money is doing a lemonade stand where we made exactly
Do you have a project that baffles or befuddles you? Something that no matter how hard you lean on it, you can’t get it to budge? A door that refuses to open? My writing is often that way. Right in the middle of a novel, I think about that delicious other novel I’ve always wanted
I write a lot about planting reading seeds. These kids go to school in one of the first schools where Ethiopia Reads got to plant a library–and I had the pleasure of reading a note from a visiting professor who led a training that the librarian and one teacher from the school attended. “The children
Hands across continents. This spring, middle school students in Grand Forks, ND fanned out into their community for a work day to raise money for a library that will be planted by Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org) in the Somali region of Ethiopia. A former Ethiopian national football player–now working on his PhD at AAMU–visited the school
Parts of my recent ship trip brought back snippets of memories–probably not even from that first trip when I was two and our family moved to Ethiopia for the first time, probably from the ship that floated us back across the Atlantic when I was seven and coming to visit America for the first time. I remember that Mom
I have only a handful of memories from my first ocean journey across the Atlantic as our family headed to live in Ethiopia. My dad took us up on the deck one night and showed us the moon on the water. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Make this into a picture that you will always carry with
Work for yourself? Give yourself many vacation days? I don’t. I love my volunteer work for Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org) and my writing and speaking…and with both time and money in a Big Squeeze, vacations get squeezed out. But we made ourselves grab a few weeks in April to float across the Atlantic–a trip I first took when I
Writing a book starts with a totally empty page. Or screen. Terrifying. I didn’t find it so when I was starting out. I always felt charged up and confident and bubbling with ideas and words and details. (John Gardner said details are the life blood of fiction.) Now I guess I understand how long the journey
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