February 20, 2013 – 10:53 pm
Perhaps it was his eyes: the kindness there, the depth of his gaze. Or maybe it was the quality of his listening, the way he seemed to hear with his whole body, leaning in to catch every word. His lined face held no judgment, no impatience or tension or hint of boredom. Nothing but love. Waves of people surged by on the busy sidewalk, laughing and chatting, but his attention never wavered from the young woman who sat across the table from him, pouring out her tale. I’m pretty he sure he didn’t even notice me when I paused, and…
February 2, 2013 – 9:11 pm
Before the first winter snow flies here in New Hampshire, some of us pound stakes into the ground alongside our driveways, to remind us later, after the landscape is blanketed in white, of exactly where the pavement ends and the lawn begins. Nothing fancy, just a few metal rods, perhaps with a reflector at the top, to keep the plow or the snowblower from straying off track. They are, quite literally, guideposts. As I sat holed up in my bedroom today, making notes for the talk I’ll give to a group of parents on the West Coast on Tuesday, I…
January 21, 2013 – 6:50 pm
Just over a year ago, I hit the wall. I’d been writing for months, throwing away more pages than I kept, feeling less sure of myself and what I was doing with every passing day. I had a deadline, the end of March. But I wasn’t at all sure I had a book. Two days after New Years, with both sons back at school, I flew to Florida and set up camp in the guest bedroom of my parents’ house. My mom, keeping her promise not to tempt me with distractions, went about her carefree retiree’s life. Meanwhile, I holed…
December 7, 2012 – 6:52 am
I practiced a visualization all through last winter, one I returned to again and again as I sat alone writing in my son Henry’s upstairs bedroom. In my mind’s eye I saw my friend Margaret Roach at my side, finished books in our hands, the two of us doing a reading together. Margaret, I knew, was holed up in her own snug little house three hours from mine, working on her garden memoir, “The Backyard Parables.” Most mornings, before settling down to serious work, we would send each other a Skype greeting. “You ok up there?” she’d type, usually around…
October 19, 2012 – 3:59 pm
The process of publishing a book has changed a bit since my own early days in the business. Looking back at my beginnings as a fresh-out-of-college editorial assistant, I marvel at how quaint it all seems now, sort of like a profession from another era. Well, I guess it was. My first task, on my very first day of work at Ticknor & Fields (a small, long-defunct New Haven subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Company) back in January of 1981, was to sit down with an empty scrapbook, a pair of scissors, and a jar of rubber cement. There had been…
