On this day, the day before the public launch of my book, this is how I feel. Exhausted after juggling dozens of balls in the air for months – details, people, dates, queries, correspondences, posts, promotions – and grateful for the many incredible people I have met along the way, which includes, most recently, reviewers and event…

I am freaking out over here. To say that this has been a long time coming is an understatement. I read my poems at public readings in the late 70s, produced a couple of short plays in the mid-80s. A single mother with an eight-year-old, I published Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery in 1996 followed…

Mariam likes to get up before Cedric, just as the world is taking shape, and stroll in her nightgown and robe through their newly-built home on Novato Ridge – her Shangri-La. Oh, how they soothe her, these rolling hills that stretch north and west beyond the tidy housing development – like a pride of sleeping…

I am a visual thinker. A sensual woman. A sensory woman. What I see is important to me. What I touch, the texture. What I smell. What I hear. Light and the way light alters the density of things as they appear, muting or brightening color, shading, creating atmosphere and mood. When I first imagined…

Two years ago, I sat down with my brother, a website designer at the time, to work on creating an author website. It was late 2019, and The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs & Other Stories had not yet won the McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. It had, however, received what I called “rave-declines” from a…

Body memory fascinates me. The ways we are marked by our pasts, literally, on our skin – bruises, scars, tracks, tattoos – and invisibly – memory of genocide over generations, phantom limbs. My entire collection explores these themes. The title story explores the unexpected encounter between a tall, thin high school history teacher, Harriet, who hates her body and Callahan,…