Book of Quotations
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I...
New Moon
Do you know what a new moon looks like? Of course, I do, you’re probably thinking. Until two days ago, I would have thought exactly the same, but I wouldn’t really have been seeing a new moon in my head. Because I have been in the middle of one book (or six) pretty much ever since I picked up my first kindergarten reader,...
On Waiting
I am blinking and shielding my eyes as I look toward another hot and humid Florida summer, and I am thinking about winter. One of my favorite poets, Louise Gluck, invokes winter in “Snowdrops”: “You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you,” she writes. I lived in Chicago for ten years, and winter has meaning for me. ...
The Mystery at (or Secret of?) Lilac Inn
The first time I held a Nancy Drew book in my hands, I was in our tiny school library. I knelt down low and pulled a yellow-bound book from the bottom shelf. The Secret of the Old Clock. I was only seven years old, and I suppose I hadn’t even been reading books on my own for very long. The idea of genre was only starting to take fuzzy...