I buy lots of old editions of American Heritage. It’s always interesting, and you often find really terrific stories. I picked up June 1966 and found the letters home from Barna Upton, a young man from Charlemont who enlisted in the army in 1845 out of a “spirit of adventure […]
It’s funny the tunes that pop into your head, especially if you were once a chorister as I was. At a company I worked at there was a machine called the baler which the stockhandlers got assigned to. Whenever it was my turn, I would sing, “Baal we cry to […]
I cooked up this writing exercise the other night: What if you learned that you would soon be no more and you wanted to pass along all the lessons you have learned about life to a young person you care about. What would you say (or write)? Now I think […]
I’ve been taking my mom to church on Sundays because she likes to sing the hymns, and it has brought back lots of childhood memories of singing in the the choir at St. Paul’s Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. The Congregational Church in South Deerfield is one of those beautiful historic […]
We had a real orgy of tag sales in Deerfield Saturday — more than sixty! It all started when my entrpreneur cousin Max, founder of the Deeerfield Attractions website, went to a town-wide tag sale in New Jersey and thought he would try out the idea up here. The idea […]
I got this list from Mridula’s award-winning blog Travel Tales From India. The idea is to bold the books you have read, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish and underline the ones you read in school. The list reminded me of a lot of great books I haven’t […]
I went to a poetry reading and book signing at Mocha Maya’s in Shelburne Falls last week. Lea Banks was signing copies of her new book All of Me, available through Booksmyth Press, Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Twenty years ago, Lea and I founded The Writer’s Circle in Henniker, New Hampshire, […]
I just got back from a quick trip to Elko, Nevada, and I’m full of balloon juice, having been pumped up by Baxter Black, former large-animal veterinarian and legendary cowboy poet. I stayed at a real-live ranch and rode the range with a real-life cowboy, and you can’t beat that. […]
It has been hard to blog about the second half of Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massey as the young tsarevich Alexis, 14, and his sisters, Olga, 22. Marie, 20, Tatiana 18, and Anastasia, 16, approach their execution, along with their parents, with revolvers in a cellar. How gross […]
My mom, who made me bookish, is about six years old right now. About a year ago she knew who Shakepeare was. Today she can’t remember where she went an hour ago. Alas, she can’t read, as she always used to do. Her house is filled with books. I worked […]