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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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Abbas and Me: The Story Behind the Cover of LAYLA
The short story is that the photo credit for the cover image goes to Mr. Abbas Rahbar. But there’s a longer back story of all that was involved in finding the photographer and getting the permissions. One of the best things about working with a small press like Plain View is that the author gets…
Read MoreCéline Keating : On Literature and Activism
I grew up in a working-class community in Queens, New York. My parents, sister, and I lived in a small apartment that was part of a complex that sprawled over what was once farmland. I mourned the loss of land and trees that seemed to disappear daily into sprawl, I mourned the loss of friends…
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