This Columbus Day, while some protest and others laud the discovery of America – and some dispute if a land with inhabitants can even be discovered – I’m going to take a break from all the controversy and celebrate another, lesser-known explorer: my grandfather, Jewell ‘Burt’ Burton. If Columbus discovered Hispaniola, Burt discovered America. When [...]
My favorite photograph of my grandfather depicts a little boy, three or four, dressed in tattered clothes beside a dusty Model T Ford. He looks grim and determined. My grandmother said the first time she saw the picture it made her cry. There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there [...]
Project Spectrum is the creation of Lauren Weinhold of the Lolly Knitting Around blog. Her goal is to prod artists to explore the impact that color has on their lives and, in particular, their artsing and crafting, using a series of themes throughout the year. A good exercise for me, since, left to my own [...]
Upon the release of her private diaries, the (British) world was recently shocked to discover that beloved children’s author Alison Uttley, was, apparently, not very nice: She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, [...]
I am a reformed picky eater. I grew up at my grandparents’ house on a hybrid of southern from-scratch cooking and 80s junk food. To my eternal chagrin, I turned my nose up at a lot of the good stuff: black-eyed peas or turnip greens, cooked down with ham hocks; my grandmother’s homemade head cheese; [...]
I think I found Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, completely by accident, while searching for some book — any book — about Sherlock Holmes. (My last years in high school were the height of my Sherlock Holmes obsession. Once I had read Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical mysteries a hundred times, I started looking for [...]
“Did Adam have good clothes to wear on Sundays?” Laura asked Ma. “No,” Ma said. “Poor Adam, all he had to wear was skins.” Laura did not pity Adam. She wished she had nothing to wear but skins. – Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House In The Big Woods Ramona Quimby, who appears twenty years later, [...]
Last week, I attended my first professional conference since MacWorld 1995 (which I covered for my high school newspaper, true story). At the RWA Conference, I did not receive any free mousepads or laser pens, but I did cart home approximately four million books. I’m going to be in the weeds with my reading list [...]
