Clearing those pages plain, I'd make time fall away and distance shorten impossibly, fold upon fold, until the page was no longer a record of our histories but an origami swan.
The story of how I wrote my second novel begins in 1999, when my four-year-old daughter Anna had a minor accident that caused massive intercranial bleeding.
Richard Bausch can take your head off with a plain sentence. He’s direct, no frills, no pirouettes. A writer who says what he means and not a word more.
The truth is you didn’t want to disappear, but you were already disappearing. Your skin burned clean away, your body no longer recognizable without the flip chart at the foot of your hospital bed.
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids:…
Talking to your kid can be as nerve-wracking as going in for a big job interview. And it’s also like interviewing a temperamental actor or rock star—you’re afraid if you ask the wrong thing, they’ll tear off their lapel mic and say, “This interview is over!”
And that house right there? The one that sits exactly adjacent to field? Whose windows overlook the swings and the monkey bars and the kiddie pool and the slip-n-slide and the blackberry bushes? That is Jerry Sandusky’s house.