Announcement: First Place in Fiction at the 2021 Tucson Festival of Books !
The Tucson Festival of Books is astonishing in scope – the free book fair combines hundreds of author booths on the stunning campus of University of Arizona in Tucson, as well as panels, readings, talks. Founded in 2009, the festival is visited typically by more than130,000 book lovers. Fiction Award The festival awards prizes in…
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The Artistic World of Landscape/Waterscape Photographer Gary Kuehn
Nature’s beauty inspires my writing, as does art that takes nature as its subject. I’m interested in the ways a focus on landscape and water plays out for painters and photographers. Recently I updated my website and wanted images that reflect my writing, in particular, the world of Montauk, Long Island, where my most recent…
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Snug Harbor’s Chinese Scholar’s Garden, a Model of Urban Garden Design
The Chinese Scholar’s Garden on Staten Island is a tiny gem, one of the most beautifully designed gardens I’ve ever seen. Tucked away on the grounds of Snug Harbor museum, a short bus ride from the ferry terminal to Manhattan, it is one of only two classical Chinese gardens in the U.S. The garden took…
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Researching for A Novel
A challenge for me is squaring the Montauk of my imagination with the “real” place on Long Island. In my novel, for instance, I’ve situated two of my characters in a house on Fort Pond Bay in an area of the coast that doesn’t quite exist. Meanwhile, the two children in my novel, Max and…
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Visiting the High Line
The High Line, which began as a quirky idea for an urban park, has morphed into one of New York City’s tourist attractions, a 1.5 mile long greenway with over 500 species of plants and trees. It’s touted as a stunning example of a creative repurposing of unwanted infrastructure– in this case, elevated train tracks…
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2020 Events
Event highlight this year is the Southampton Writers’ Conference (virtual this year).
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Thomas Hardy’s Literary Dorset
Thomas Hardy’s atmospheric Tess of the D’Obervilles, set in Dorchester near Dorset, made a big impression on me when I read it at a young age, for its depiction of the hard life of agricultural laborers and the restricted possibilities for women. Hardy’s home is now a museum. The modest house and grounds stand in stark contrast…
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A Sense of Place: Virginia Woolf’s “Hauntings”
Virginia Woolf regularly went on what she called “street hauntings,” where she wandered around London. She wanted to feel absorbed in her surroundings, and in particular to watch people’s interactions with the city. She described this as leading to a “dissolution of the self,” a sense that the boundaries between herself and her environment were…
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“Eating the Sea”
There’s no way to write about Montauk without writing about fish and shellfish. Any beach walk brings treasures like clam, scallop, mussel and oyster shells, the strong tang of dried seaweed, the sight of boats in the distance and fisherman along the shore. Fishing and shellfishing are the heart of the place. The Eastern End…
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Alexis Rockman’s Art: An Environmental Call to Action
Alexis Rockman’s art is fascinating. I love how his paintings look—vivid, colorful, eye-popping. They are not only gorgeous visually, but also serve as a call to action. For instance, his recent “The Great Lakes Cycle,” have been described as “natural-history psychedelia” https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/alexis_rockman.html. This recent series explores the geographical, physical, and ecological changes of the Great Lakes…
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