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Joys of December

Posted by on Dec 4, 2023 in BOOK: Griffin's Boy, Editing, Uncategorized | 0 comments

photo by karishea

The satisfaction of hitting SEND and whooshing off a second draft to your editor is just about equaled by the satisfaction of having a stack of Christmas presents wrapped, packed, addressed, and ready for the post office.

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Grateful

Posted by on Nov 22, 2023 in Inspiration, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Today I’m grateful for the way books develop empathy. They are the best tool that I know of for learning to live inside other people’s minds, hearts, and stories.

Every step we take outside of our own experience is valuable, worthwhile, and hopeful.

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What We Are Doing to Libraries

Posted by on Nov 16, 2023 in Educators & Librarians, Politics, Uncategorized | 0 comments

If you want your heart broken–or if your heart is made of stronger stuff than mine–read this piece from the Washington Post, “The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.”

Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.


A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.


Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave.

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Today in Maine

Posted by on Oct 27, 2023 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Today I was supposed to be talking about books and about writing nonfiction at a school in Waterville, Maine. It’s about an hour away from my home in Portland.

I’m not speaking there because–well. You know why I’m not speaking there. I can’t quite bear to articulate why schools across Maine are closed for the second day in a row.

I wish I could say I’m shocked. Astonished. Enraged. I wish I could feel those things. Instead, what fills my mind is mostly a profound, enveloping weariness, and this poem. It’s called “On Getting out of Vietnam.”

Theseus, if he did destroy the Minotaur
(It’s hard to say, that may have been myth),
Was careful not to close the labyrinth.
So After kept on looking like Before:
Back home in Athens still the elders sent
Their quota of kids to Knossos, confident
they would find something to die of, and for.

I learned this by heart when I was a teenager in a summer writing program. Howard Nemerov, the author, was a guest speaker, a visiting writer. Which is what I’m supposed to be today, but I can’t. Because today’s After looks so much like Before.



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