Marcel Proust (above) defined deep reading as the moment when, “That which is the end of [the author’s] wisdom appears to us as the beginning of ours.” (1906) Book editor Peter Dimock took it one step further, calling deep reading, “A time of internal solitary consciousness.” (2010) Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust & […]
B*tches in Bookshops
Originally published in June 2012 in Blog
Show me the money ~ Part 3
Originally published in March 2012 in Blog
I feel a change in the air. No, not spring. This may be even better than raindrops on tulips and girls in white dresses. The first sign of climate change for freelance writers is emerging for real, and, in a very unexpected twist, the future looks bright. Really bright. After four decades of earning a […]
Out of sight
Originally published in April 2011 in Blog
Updated on April 10: scroll to bottom I spent four years at Queen’s University shouting in Gaelic at football games, waiting in line at the campus pub and preparing for slide tests (I was an art history major). In between socializing, two ideas mentioned in passing during my painting seminars shot up like flares: Men […]
Hall of Fame
Originally published in September 2010 in Blog
Here are just a few of the writers who amaze me. Gay Talese “New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were […]
The long goodbye …
Originally published in February 2010 in Blog
I got a lot of moving feedback the first time I wrote about my mother, Catherine, here in The Long Goodbye, published four years ago on this blog. After she died in December 2012, I expanded on the story of our relationship and turned it into a magazine piece for Glow Magazine. You can read that version here. I […]
