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Jane Austen’s Bath, England
The formal and elegant city of Bath is an exquisite example of a planned city. If “city” and “jumbled” go together for you, a city as harmonious as Bath will take a bit of getting used to. Built along the Avon river and its gentle slopes, white and cream buildings form grand avenues and crescents beyond the town…
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Meditation Upon a Frozen River
Is nature so important to us because it’s the ultimate creative force? In my writing and in my life, setting, and being out of doors, is important to me. I find that experiencing nature directly – feeling the sharp prick of a thorn, hearing the soft whoosh of a plop of snow, recoiling from the scent…
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Historic Lamb House, Home of Henry James, in Rye, East Sussex
Many artists and writers find inspiration in landscape or in the built environments of cities and towns. What attracts a writer to a given location? A drawing of a house is what drew author Henry James (1843-1916), an American who lived in Britain, to the the historic seaport town of Rye, in East Sussex, England. Enchanted…
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New York’s South Street Seaport
It’s hard to think of bustling, spire-jammed Manhattan as an island, with miles of river frontage. For centuries, the waterfront was meant for work, not pleasure. But in the last several decades that’s changed, and redevelopment is occuring all along the coasts, notably Battery Park and more recently, Hudson Yards. The South Street Seaport waterfront…
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Community Sharing: “Barn Quilts” and Little Free Libraries
This summer my husband, Mark, and I spent a few weeks in the Adirondacks and southern Quebec. We took a ferry across Lake Champlain from Essex, NY, to Burlington, VT, then drove north across the border into Canada and along the Richelieu River, stopping at small towns along the way. This kind of aimless wandering,…
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Music Lover? You’ll Love These Novels
Authors and Books That Have Inspired Me
Eleanor Frances Lattimore: Fair Bay Like a painter using a few delicate brush strokes, Lattimore creates in this children’s book a rich, imagistic world from few words, illustrating the principal that less can truly be more. This is the first book I fell in love with. It made me a reader and instilled in…
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Novels That Ask, What’s At Stake in Starting Over?
One of the themes that I explore in my novel Play for Me is second chances and the disruption we face when searching for our authentic selves. The following novels focus on women who break out of the mold of expectation. They do so to discover their true passion, which could be a second chance…
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The Joy of Unintended Consequences: My Unlikely Path to Becoming a Music Journalist
I became a music journalist because my husband gave me guitar lessons as a birthday present. It was a lovely gesture that led to an obsession. When I was young, my father sat at the piano practicing every night after dinner, and I twirled and leaped around the living room, dancing to Chopin. My father…
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A Conversation About LAYLA with Céline Keating
Q: You’ve described your novel by saying that “Layla is the story of a young woman whose journey forward is through the past.” What drew you to telling a story about this period through the perspective of someone too young to have experienced it? A: I wanted to write a book set in the political…
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