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Tulip Time
I love the absolute excess of masses and masses of tulips – their exuberance, their riot of color. On the Upper West Side there’s a lovely community garden that’s nestled among tall buildings https://www.westsidecommunitygarden.org/. Here residents tend a pocket garden that runs between 89th and 90th streets between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The garden is…
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Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest
Tucked into Madison Square Park is an unexpected installation. At first it strikes one as curious – odd leafless trees in a cluster, framed by the Manhattan skyline. This is a statement piece by Mia Lin, an extraordinary way of making climate change visible. She has literally brought a dying forest to the city, so…
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2021 Events
Most events this year continue to be virtual. October 13, 2021 Reading & Conversation If interested, a link to this event is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPHVvkgCxDE March 6-10, 2021 Tucson Festival of Books This wonderful festival and conference was virtual this year. https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/ I was honored to win the first place fiction award! https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=1486
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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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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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