To say that Valerie Boyd was a critically acclaimed writer, editor and educator doesn’t do her justice. And when she passed away in February at age 58 after a five-year battle with pancreatic cancer, she left behind an incredible legacy. “Wrapped in Rainbows,” Valerie Boyd’s biography of Zora Neale Hurston, is considered one of the […]
Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir “Uncultured” explores the parallels between her childhood in the Children of God and her time serving in the U.S. army The first chapter of Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir Uncultured opens with a screech: It is 1993 and Mestyanek Young—then 5 years old—is inside a commune in Brazil, standing at the back […]
At the end of the year that Julie Powell spent cooking every recipe (more or less) from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” she came to mayonnaise collée. It is a hand-whisked mayonnaise thickened with gelatin — a kind of stiff, salty garnish that was piped decoratively over aspics and the like in […]
Brian O’Hare, originally from Pittsburgh, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and former U.S. Marine Corps officer, now an award-winning writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Find him on Twitter , Facebook , and Instagram , and at his website BrianOHare.com . In this post, Brian discusses the process of writing his […]
Author Joanna Quinn spent 10 years writing “The Whalebone Theatre.” (Photo credit: Nancy Turner / Courtesy of Knopf) When Joanna Quinn sat down to write her first novel, she knew she wanted to create the sort of sprawling epic period piece she loves to read. Of course, writing a novel like that takes longer than […]
Photo by Stocksnap on Pixabay Growing up, I spent most of my time either playing dress up in my room and acting out scenes from movies or writing in my journal. More often than not, I was writing. I remember first writing about my dad being in Iraq when I was in third grade. It […]
When Nicholas Gage gives a talk titled “A Writer’s Odyssey” Oct. 21 as part of Grafton’s Small Stones Festival of the Arts, he’ll begin with “an immigrant kid who didn’t know English at the age of 10.” That kid, born Nikos Gatzoyiannis, had already been through a lot of trauma. His earliest years were spent […]
iStock.com First there was Nathalie, an English language learner who whispered that she’d never done well in English, never liked it, but this course was different . And her writing was getting better. Then there was Nseandra, who avoided the news because it was depressing and paralyzing. Yet Nseandra became one of my strongest reporters, […]
Writer Frank Kensaku Saragosa, who was formerly homeless, poses near a sidewalk encampment in San Diego. SAN DIEGO — Omaha native Frank Kensaku Saragosa felt a bit uneasy as he walked past the tents that lined the sidewalk along downtown San Diego’s East Village. “I used to stay over there,” he said, pointing to an […]
Frank Kensaku Saragosa felt a bit uneasy as he walked past the tents that lined the sidewalk along downtown San Diego’s East Village. “I used to stay over there,” he said, pointing to an embankment off Commercial Street near Interstate 5. Saragosa, 56, was anxious that some of the homeless people in the sidewalk encampments […]
