Dear Great-Grandma,

I was in the store just after 6 this morning, beating the crowds to get my Thanksgiving supplies. The clerk said to me, “I can see you’re in charge of the vegetables this year. You have all the fancy things.” She was holding a cabbage and a bunch of radishes.

And I thought of you, Great-Grandma. I thought of you and your cousins ( Read more... )

Here’s one from the archives today:

The Troll (A Tale Told Collectively)

“Because Aunt Margit knows that the stories must be told.”

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

I was on the phone with my favorite great-aunt today, and I told her that I had been going through my stories in a particular setting, writing down a master file of who was who and who was where and who was related to which other person so that I wouldn’t contradict myself in future.

Auntie: “Oh, that’s good! Because some people get really ( Read more... )

We are staying in a lake house with markgritter's side of the family, as we are wont to do the last few years--it works well to rent a big house where we can all be together and read our books and watch movies and play games and cook meals and stuff. But there is a thing that puzzles me, fairly consistently, and it is this ( Read more... )

About six years ago, I wrote a post about Nana and the last of her home-canned peaches. And I talked about how lucky we were to have her still, and to have her be so much herself, after what she called her "little spell" and the doctors called a hemorrhaging brain aneurism. (For those of you who don't follow the link: this is my "aunt" Kathy's ( Read more... )

Other writers: please to be writing me stories with this epigraph:

"Every family snapshot album is an argument for the doctrine of Original Sin."--W.H. Auden, "The Double Focus: Sandberg's Lincoln"

Because I don't think I have one, and yet it amuses me.

Me: I was telling a story and mentioned her friend Harold and then turned to my mom and said, "Not actually a giraffe," and she broke up laughing. Grandma sort of patiently sat there and waited for us to start making sense again.
timprov: I hope someone's bringing her food.

When I was small, my cousins and I went to the Emmy Gifford Children's Theater all the time. There was James and the Giant Peach, for which my aunt Kathy got us peach Jolly Ranchers to suck while we watched the beautiful giant bug costumes--I expect there was a James, but I have no memory of him--and there was Cinderella, for which one of the ( Read more... )

Under friendslock, one of my friends asked about "bucket lists" or "life lists," and I decided that I should edit my comment to be suitable to repost here: I have deliberately not done that thing, and I intend to keep deliberately not doing it ( Read more... )

I am extra, extra careful about giving my characters my point of view on comparatively obscure things. For one, it's not always appropriate, and for another, I don't really like having people assume that I mean to use some character or another for a mouthpiece in general just because we agree on a particular point ( Read more... )