The Novel Life
Dear Readers,
I find myself apologizing again for the lack of posts. The past three weeks have found us on the road, across six states (all via car), with a toddler and a prayer. Speciifc memories are blurred, but somewhere in the mix are mental snapshots of a birth, a wedding, a funeral, a book fair, [...]
Grave Realities
Of all the stories in Trespassers, people approach me most often about “the one in the cemetery.” I don’t mind. I’m a cemetery fan. Call it bizarre, but when you grow up in a small town, the local graveyard is more or less your art museum. You may see obelisks in your history books, marking [...]
Jason Becker. Don’t know of him? You should. You really, really should.
A few days ago, my husband and I were loading groceries into the car when something stopped Sean cold. He leaned into the window of the car next to us and squinted hard, as if his eyes might have deceived him.
“Get me a pen and paper, please,” he said, with some urgency. My eyes shot [...]
The Book Rebel
Though it seems a shame of wasted youth to admit it, I didn’t really rebel much in high school. And it wasn’t because I was a preacher’s kid. My parents didn’t make me wear a chastity belt, or a long denim skirt. I was never forced to recite Psalms as penance for wearing red nail [...]
Outfittin’ Your Book Nook
I think all people who love books harbor secret dreams of living in a book-lined world, of carefully and artfully displaying those volumes they cherish as much as family albums.
Growing up, Meg and I loved to “play” library. The day my mother bought us a little date stamp during an Office Depot trip, we were [...]
Playground Extinctions
Well, despite my numerous rants about the state of the market, I have finally done it. We moved to a new home last week and are settling in. We left our old house in the hands of some nice dental students, and pray that they don’t indulge in recreational laughing gas or drilling things that [...]
That 25 Things Thing
There’s been an annoying little chain letter (plague) going around Facebook, where a person gets “tagged” by a buddy and is then obligated to publish 25 facts about herself. I decided to give in and play along. Here are my factoids. Feel free to reply with yours:
1. I love to write, and [...]
National Freak Family Week (Or “Why I Heart the Duggars”)
I think we’ve established that pastors’ kids are freaks. They are born into freak, in-the-fishbowl families, and they can’t do anything about it. Their lives are the subject of speculation always, fascination sometimes, and ridicule all too often. To some, they are idols to be emulated, carved in cream cheese. To others, they are a [...]
Really???
It’s been a loooong post-holiday season and I have much to blog about. But while I write, please content yourself to laugh/cry/gawk in amazement at this. Someone pointed it out to me and I was convinced it had to be a joke. It’s not.
Fellow church-goers: If we don’t want to become caricatures of ourselves, [...]
Goodnight, Adam.
This morning, when I turned on my computer and saw this, a still-open era from my childhood finally ended.
Adam Walsh would have been 33 today. But when he was six, he became not just a headline, but a pop culture icon to my friends and me. He embodied our first encounter with real fear — fear with [...]