Around the World in 35 Days, Part 2
Yosano Akiko birthplace, Sakai, Japan By the time you read this, I will likely already be in Russia. But I started drafting this post in Japan, on the shinkansen (bullet train) after leaving Osaka on Thursday, June 22, to wend my way north and west to ...
Around the World in 35 Days, Part 1
Yosano Akiko The subject of my next novel, another historical project about an epic journey, is the Japanese poet and feminist Yosano Akiko (1878-1942). In 1912, at the age of 33, Akiko left her home in Tokyo and traveled by herself to Paris. This ...
Our Year in Reading 2016
Books we both read & loved This was the year my husband read more—a lot more—than I did. There were two simple reasons for this: He read more, and I read less. He joined two book clubs in 2016, which explains, at least in part, his impressiv ...
And the Nobel goes to…
Ill: N. Elmehed. © Nobel Media 2016 When the Swedish Academy announced this morning that Bob Dylan was their choice for this year’s Literature Prize, people went crazy in exactly the ways you'd expect: his die-hard fans were jubilant; many writers and ...
On Writering
Writering it up, One Story Debutante Ball, May 2016 (Photo Dan Fuchs) See the end of this post for details about the Landfalls audiobook giveaway. It ends July 14, 2016. Before my book came out, I was a writer who spent a lot of time writing. N ...
On Sleepiness and Writing
Am I the only writer out there who regularly falls asleep over her keyboard? Please tell me I'm not. It goes like this: I've carved out a precious hour or two to write, but as soon as I hit a point where I need to stop and think for a moment, which is ...
Our Year in Reading 2015
In under the wire, my annual round-up of the books my husband and I read over the year. My book-loving guy and I read two books in common this year: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which we both loved (a rare event for us), and Alice McDermott’s S ...
Tall Ship Bounty
It’s October 29, 2015, the third anniversary of the sinking of the Tall Ship Bounty. Bounty, built in 1960 as a replica of the famous HMS Bounty, sank off the coast of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy. A daring and dangerous US Coast Guard rescue ...
Oh, the Irony: I Wrote a Book about Intrepid Explorers and I Don’t Even Like to Travel
Here’s a question that’s come up pretty often at my book events: “How many of the places described in your book have you actually been to in person?” Answer: One. Chapter 7 of Landfalls, my fictionalized account of the Lapérouse expedition, is s ...
Moby-Dick Blackout Poems
Blackout poem in progress My novel Landfalls came out in North America yesterday (!!!), and I want to share a quirky project I’ve been working on in anticipation of its launch. The idea came from Austin Kleon’s newspaper blackout poems. Kleon’s tec ...