I suspect we all wanted to be Jill Ker Conway. Or at least to grow up to be just like her, our much adored and admired college president. Surely we listened, rapt, as she greeted the Smith College freshman class of 1980. Perhaps we wondered if perhaps just by being there, in her bright orbit for four years, we might somehow come to possess something of her grace and intellect, her clear sense of purpose, her quiet charisma. It was not lost on anyone that she happened to look really great in her clothes, too. Slender, tidy, a mite Katherine…
“The call to a second journey usually commences when unexpected change is thrust upon you, causing a crisis of feelings so great that you are stopped in your tracks.” – Joan Anderson, The Second Journey I first read those words about nine months ago, sitting alone in an empty kitchen, having wondered for weeks just what I was meant to do next, now that the house was built, the long-awaited book finally written and published, the sons nearly grown. This weekend, I went to meet the woman who wrote them, the woman who once ran away from home to spend…
One thing that happens, when you publish a book, is that dedicated, hard-working editors inevitably seek you out, in the hope of procuring an enthusiastic blurb for the back cover of some forthcoming book that is deemed to be similar in theme or appeal to your own. As New York editor Judith Regan recently admitted, “Blurbs! Chasing them is agony; getting one is ecstasy. I’ve written more forelock-tugging, hand-wringing blurb request letters than I can count, which is just as well because I’m sure if I quantified my success rate it would show a sad return on investment. It’s not…
