Author, Journalist, Pop Folklorist
When I wrote my first novel, Other Waters, I was a graduate student in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, so I had the benefit of hearing lots and lots of other people’s opinions about my work. The core of the program was the workshop, a weekly seminar in which you…
Read more about The Littlest Critic–What My Toddler Taught Me about Writing
A week ago my daughter Amalia turned one. One of the things that freaked me out about kids before I had one of my own was the way they serve as a physical manifestation of the passage of time. There are entire eras of my life where a year or two could pass without anything…
Read more about Act Like a Baby: Life Lessons from a One-Year-Old
Five minutes before we took over the microphone from the DJ at my daughter’s baptismal reception, we notified her godfather that we expected him to say a few words. He had flown in from Nicaragua, where my husband’s family lives, for the occasion, and in all the preparation we had somehow forgotten to warn him…
“Life is a circle,” my cousin said. Or maybe it was “life is a cycle”—you could translate the Greek word either way. We were talking about my daughter’s baptism, which took place on Sunday in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I grew up. My cousin came from the island of Corfu, Greece, to act as Amalía’s godmother,…
Read more about The Circle Dance: The Sacred and the Mundane
I was trolling Facebook on my phone and sloppily dribbling breast milk onto my skirt when I first saw the Time magazine cover asking me if I’m “mom enough.” On the one hand, the breast milk confirmed I am, indeed, a mother. On the other, the question, with it’s sassy little adverb, and the picture…
A few weeks ago my mother, Joanie, called me up all atwitter, as she often does after reading not one but two newspapers first thing in the morning. (Bless her heart, she is singlehandedly keeping the physical, print version of the newspaper alive.) “Guess what!” she chirped. “The newspaper says that according to the census,…
