Of Horses, Humans, and Healing
Of course, it's not only horses; it's most animals that respond to human attention, nurture, and love on what is very much a two-way street. I wrote about my beautiful therapy Labrador retriever, Hannah, in Where The Trail Grows Faint, a memoir of her antics while she...
Reunions
I’ve just come home from a big family reunion in Florida. It was actually my second reunion of the year, the first having been in Connecticut, a three-day extravaganza of my high school graduating class. Fortunately, that one was in October and I’ve had two months to...
Getting There is Not Half The Fun
When Google maps swears that a drive to New England from southwestern Ohio is absolutely going to take sixteen hours and twenty-one minutes, you can be completely sure that Mr. Google Maps is a gold-level member of the Pinnochio Club. Like a certain person to whom I...
Award for A Matter of Mercy
A Matter of Mercy won the Independent Publishers Silver Medal for Best North-East Fiction last week. It has a shiny new medallion on the cover. Kristina Makansi of Blank Slate Press, my publisher, will be in New York City at Book Expo America and will represent me...
My Facebook Wedding
I must have gotten engaged without realizing it. All I know is this: my sister called and said I’d posted something on Facebook about how another author’s book was an overnight best seller with no marketing effort. She wanted to know why my publisher doesn’t use...
A Matter of Mercy
I'm thrilled to introduce you to my new novel, A MATTER OF MERCY, published August 1. This one has so much of my heart in it. Set in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, it began when I became friends with one of the oyster farmers, Barbara Austin, whom I met while walking...
Breaking Bad
Television is evil. It is obviously ruining The Perfect Dog. This is all our kids' fault. They insisted that my husband and I are completely out of it (new evidence of their favorite point!) when they belatedly discovered that we'd never watched a single episode of...
On Control
I love control. If everyone—including my dog—would only do what I tell them, it would put the fun back in dysfunctional and (my) life would go so much more smoothly. Let’s include objects too, so my computer would stop being a butthead. Ditto my iphone 5s, and...
A Perfect Dog
Meet Scout. We just adopted him. Yes, I know: "That's not a very original name." My daughter already told me. But Atticus seemed a bit of a mouthful, Calpurnia was out of the question, and Jem sounds like "Gem," and I didn't want to be accused--again--of implying that...