September threw itself at our household with hurricane strength. While the wind and rain trashed Haiti and the U.S.’s lower southeast, evil peppered my New Orleans home in the form of my mother’s surprise cancer diagnosis, my uncle’s death, and a ratcheting up of tantrums from my children that makes me consider constructing a panic […]
Category Archives: Storytelling
(Yesterday’s post, Part 1, mused on the connections between stories, in particular the story of how Joe and I met and eventually traveled to Navajoland to get married. If you missed it, visit the Home Page.) The Puritans believed God gave us two sacred texts–the Bible and Nature. All we have to do, they said, was look, really […]
People often ask writers, Where do you get your stories? One answer is, They are all around you. Listen. It was in the Santa Fe Museum of Indian Arts & Culture that I first saw them, a collection of clay figurines made by the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Based on the tradition of the […]
Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard my side of the story. So narrates A. Wolf in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. In this […]
Part One Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending with Butterflies, Flames, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things. She is young and blonde (or raven-haired) and beautiful – always beautiful. That is unless she’s old and grey and stout. She sleeps or runs or tiptoes through the […]
Throughout my adolescent years, I was ‘forced’ to make weekly trips to visit my grandparents just like so many other close-knit families of that day. The adults would talk, laugh and bicker, and then we would all eat dinner around the small kitchen table. As I grew older, and more insolent I’ll admit, I became […]
Sometimes, taking a ‘wrong turn’ in life can actually lead you exactly where you want or need to be. In the case of my family, and the exciting change in our lives this past year, that is precisely what occurred… After growing up in a coastal town in Maine, my husband and I spent many […]
Alcée Fortier doesn’t get it. He’s spent decades listening, absorbing, and translating a vast collection of stories recounted by the humans living in and around the great estate of Le Petit Versailles built by his grandfather – the first to refine sugar in Louisiana – Valcour Aimé. It is a strange fact that the old […]
Dear Editor, I know I promised to write about how concrete imagery draws a reader into a story, but I’ve had such a week that I just couldn’t. Several months ago we had a huge Red Oak tree cut down after it dropped a large limb onto my neighbor’s driveway. Unfortunately, she was in the […]
Click on blue title to read this post in your browser. Storytelling runs deep in the Ozarks. I grew up in the kiddie pools of it, but always waded over to the adult tables at picnics and reunions. If you ever get the chance, listen to some Ozark stories. Rest assured you’ll be either laughing […]
Readers Unbound 