A cookbook memoir

Sometimes I suggest family recipes as points of entry for writing a memoir. Does your Italian grandmother’s pasta sauce stir up memories of holiday gatherings? Do you recall your kid brother’s grin every time you bake the oatmeal cookies he loved? Using this approach, some writers end up compiling cookbooks laced with treasured family stories […]

Just the two of us

Retirement? One of my friends calls it “the R word,” claiming she can’t imagine what she and her husband will do when they’re “stuck at home together.” Doug and I are semi-retired, but we’re both busier than ever and enjoying this stage of life. Still, it took a while to adjust to the changes in […]

Creative obsession

No, I haven’t gone missing — it’s just that I’ve been lured “off-campus” by my other blog. This year, I finally gathered a portfolio of my artwork and started building a separate site for it. I’ve created the new art blog by myself — no help from the family geeks — and I’m having a […]

You gotta read this

Digital busyness is the enemy of depth.” — William Powers I really couldn’t put it down. When Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age arrived last week, I promised myself I’d give it a quick glance and return to it later. (So many other books in my need-to-read stack!) But I got hooked […]

“Fairy Tale” won 1st prize

Several years ago, I stumbled on collage as a way to conquer writer’s block. It still works like magic. While I love being a journalist, sometimes I’m restricted by editorial guidelines and word counts, not to mention deadlines. But my altered art projects are crafted freely from my own imagination, at my own pace. I […]

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