historical fiction for a modern reader
We scrabble our way to the end, trying to find the last dollars to finish it. Yet it’s such a beauty! People are so happy to see it! The only thing that’s been harder than building a library in a small town has been learning to write fiction. As it seems I’m a glutton for … Read more…
Half the town thinks it’s a great idea. Half the town reads mainly hunting magazines and doesn’t see why anyone would ever go to a library. Half the town wants to help pay for it but has only dollar bills to share. Half the town doesn’t think it’s worth even a nickel. Less than 1% … Read more…
I’m a pretty chill person in general. I’ve had to be…to raise three kids on a farm, build our own house, start various small businesses, and navigate leadership roles on a series of public boards. The more crises I see, the more I take each one in stride. Most times, whatever it is…I’ve seen it … Read more…
Does it look easy from here?? Well . . . Here’s the actual story: 2001 Lisa Sammet, the new Library Director, vowed to bring the Jeudevine into the 21st century. She said right away that we needed more space. The historic 1895 library is an architectural gem, but also a dollhouse. It holds a total … Read more…
So you think you’re fairly hip, eh? You’ve negotiated college and graduate school and you can read a subway map like you were born with it hardwired into your brain. You know the coolest coffee shops with the most friendly-but-edgy baristas. You have interesting friends who discuss philosophy who come through town and stop in … Read more…
I’ve lived all over the United States, on both coasts and in the South and the Upper Midwest. I’ve lived in large cities and their suburbs, in a small city for eight years and now, for the past seventeen years, in a small town of 3000 people. At the age of thirty-three, after all this … Read more…
Imagine you’re a girl in junior high school. You were born in a small town, to a family of farmers and loggers, in which the only other person who likes to read is your father’s Aunt Edna, who rarely takes her nose out of an indistinguishable series of those little romance novels from the RiteAid. … Read more…
So I had another failure this week. For once it wasn’t a literary rejection, but instead the failure of a bond vote for building a new library in our town. Of course it wasn’t my failure alone—I’m part of a committee—but it was nevertheless just as crushing as anything else for which you get your … Read more…