September 10, 2019
What is it about music that binds us to time and place? Woodstock, for example. Here it is, 50 years after an event that called together musicians and their audiences to live, breathe, revel and wallow in music and other things for four days. We all remembered that hi...
June 12, 2019
Poems can be so irritating to write. Why? Some years ago I heard a dazzling great writer, maybe Margaret Atwood, provide one answer. She said you don't bid poems to come to you. They choose you, you don't choose them.
If this sounds romantic, maybe not. That perception...
April 19, 2017
I worry about small things. Children. Weeds. A crack in the plaster of the wall in my family room. The violet plant that is not thriving. The cross I bought at a most holy place, the Scottish island of Iona, while traveling with my son Rob and dearest friend Helen Russ...
April 7, 2017
April is Poetry Month, a time to read and/or write a few. Perhaps you can recall poems you have indiscriminately encountered over your lifetime, not because you had to memorize or study them, but just because you stumbled upon them and fell in love. As a girl I poured...
March 20, 2017
When book reviewer and blogger Sarah Curtis Graziano recently selected Thornton Burgess' children's classic Old Mother West Wind to include in her review of read-aloud books with multi-age appeal for Babble.com, a Walt Disney-sponsored site for parents, she wonderfull...
March 16, 2017
I look forward to meeting participants and signing copies of Nature's Ambassador at Mass Audubon's 2017 Birders Meeting this weekend on the UMass Boston campus!
Although Thornton Burgess was best known as the children's author of 70 books and a daily newspaper column, h...
March 9, 2017
I recently attended a small, intimate gathering of artists and writers, all members of the National League of American Pen Women, to discuss this unlikely topic, and here are a few of my thoughts:
Isn't the creation of art usually associated with pleasure in u...
February 22, 2017
When book reviewer and blogger Sarah Curtis Graziano recently selected Thornton Burgess' children's classic Old Mother West Wind to include in her review of read-aloud books with multi-age appeal for Babble.com, a Walt Disney-sponsored site for parents, she wonderfull...
February 5, 2017
"Why are you doing a biography on an archaeologist?" Some people have been curious about the origin of my interest in writing about Dr. George Bass, widely known as the father of underwater archaeology.
It was hardly a random choice. Recently I came across a deca...
January 12, 2017
January 2, 2017 was the day I would begin writing again.