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Cookbook Mania—In Reverse
I once was an adventurous cook, eager to try out new recipes, learn new techniques.
A Crash Course in Revision
There’s something strangely satisfying about slashing through your own prose.
The Barn Owl
Graced Land is fiction, but this character, this was from life. My life.
From Trash to Antiques
History is nakedly cruel and random, messy, inefficient, and thus, it must be clothed with story.
Graceland to Graced Land
A place of Grace where you could be assured, comforted and uplifted, all at the same time.
Audubon
I have slept in Elvis’s bedroom. Not too many people can say, can they?
Myth and Music
Forty-five years after his death Elvis remains both American myth and American mirror.
“Now You Know What I Do for an Encore…”
Twelve solid hours of music, movies, jigsaw puzzles and Fools Gold Loaf.
The Story Behind the Story
Before writing Graced Land I had not given Elvis Presley a thought since the day he died
Caveat
For eighteen years the ideas for this short novel hovered over my imaginative life.
The Great Timetable
“A History of the World from the Time of Adam to the Close of the Apostles’ Time,”
Destiny’s Consolation Prize, or “Forget Domani”
“Hi,” I said, laughing out loud, “and I’m Virginia Woolf!”
THE WEED-STREWN LOT OF PLOT #5
Memory will not be restricted to the needs of memoir. Memory is not merely unruly, but anarchic.
Passports and Visas
The past became like the creatures in Where the Wild Things Are, baring its terrible fangs, breathing its terrible breath.
M2M Unboxing Day #2
Memoir classes are especially poignant: the nature of the genre requires trust.
The Unruly Past
All pasts are unruly. All pasts resist the tidy, codifying insistence of the page, resist the will of the writer.
Unboxing Day
What, for an author, could be better than unboxing day?
Fools Rush In
I said I always wished I could see uniform trade paperbacks of my work, books that could sit on a shelf and actually look to be related, visibly related, instead straggling like unruly foster children from different homes.
To The Lighthouse
To The Lighthouse is an unequaled, exquisite cocktail of temporality and mortality.
The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s MemoirBryher
She must have been one of the most cosmopolitan women of her era. Maybe any era.
Ready for My Close-Up
Authors who write about film are the very people for whom the term nerdgasm was invented.