READ ALL ABOUT IT
Since 2012, I’ve been writing about books. And the act of reading. And the importance of story and narrative. But, mostly, the underlying theme of all I write is how taking a moment to stop and digest some longform text — instead of scrolling, instead of watching a video, instead of multitasking — can be one of the most grounding things we can do for ourselves. Here’s the one-stop online home for all this writing.
You can read more about me and my work by moseying over here. Want to peruse periodic “essay drops” — excerpts from my work-in-progress essay collection about Homesickness? Here ya go.
Say What?
When we visited the National Museum of Scotland in October, we ventured into the “rocks and minerals” wing, usually a favorite spot for my daughter. However, this time, it was my son who seemed to have a strong reaction to the amethyst geodes and orbicular granodiorite. A few feet away from him and my husband, I heard the latter gasp, “What did you say?” It turns out that my son had, rather loudly, announced the display they were looking at: Folded Schist. I’ll let you try to imagine what my husband thought his dear offspring had exclaimed in a museum.
Premises
Have you seen the Portlandia sketch “The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland (aka Portland: The Place Where Young People Go to Retire)”? You know, “Remember the 90s? …people were talking about getting piercings and tribal tattoos and people were talking about saving the planet and forming bands. When they encouraged you to be weird…It was an amazing time where people would go to the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus and watch someone hang something from their…” I’ll end there. Cue the stilt-walkers and ironic clowns on unicycles and organic paper-makers and hipsters who work “a couple hours a week at a coffee shop”…
Quiet and Careful
Here’s what I noticed within two months of moving to Dublin: People here are considerably less angsty than Americans about anything identity related. Although I’m asserting this as an outsider, when you come from a place that necessitates pigeon-holing its citizens—for political reasons, mostly—less emphasis on categorizing sings to me. America: the land of Buzzfeed quizzes that don’t even make any sense! (What Country Should You Live In?/Which U.S. President Are You?/Which Super Power Should You Actually Have?) Ireland: the place where everything is “just grand”!
Alone With My Books?
Does loneliness look the same in Las Vegas as it does in New York?
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch: The book left me simultaneously heartbroken and somehow optimistic for a happily ever after—but as far as settings go, her subtle sense of the ticks and tocks of a place, a region providing the backdrop for a culture and for a society, is one of the best I’ve read.
Neither Here nor There
Dublin Review of Books
A review of Sherman Alexie’s short story collection Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories.
Stories for Social Change in ‘Flight Behavior’ and ‘The Line
The Curator
An exploration of personal storytelling using Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior as a framing device.
Read Here or at CuratorMagazine.com
Ambiance: Where Details are Everything,
The Curator
The importance of setting — and when to generalize and when to particularize, using my experience in an international book club and its selection of the novel The Yacoubian Building (Alaa Al Aswany) as a starting point.
Read Here or at CuratorMagazine.com
The Sense of Redemption
The Curator
How important is “redemption” in a novel — or a life? An exploration of redemption and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
Read Here or at CuratorMagazine.com
And Then Came Sebastian Barry
The Curator
Can language – our lives – instead of an actual event, stir up as much emotion in one’s soul? Is it the plot, or is it the words? My encounter with Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry.
Read Here or at CuratorMagazine.com
Cat’s Eye
The Curator
How social media might have changed a later version of Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye.
Read Here or at CuratorMagazine.com
