Blog
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Women’s Bodies – and a sneak peek (at a book)
The Women’s Alliance at my college asked me to give a talk on “women’s bodies," and this is what I shared with students. "Here’s the thing. Every quality of our lives – everything that we are and everything that we will be and do – is going to play out in our bodies. In the…
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VegasStrong: What I’m going to do
It turns out I have nothing to say. Yesterday, the horror just grew from morning to night. I’m a professional imaginer, and it was the imagining that did it. I wasn’t glued to the television, I didn’t read more than a few articles in any newspaper. I did my best to know what was happening,…
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Live nude, my friend
I live in a place that might be considered exotic (or bizarre or fantastic, fanciful, implausible, preposterous, incredible: there’s a long list of adjectives, often conflicting, that might be applied) and I wrote about Las Vegas not as an exotic place, but as an ordinary one. Somewhere in We Are Called to Rise is a…
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May you know there is enough
At American Dreams: A Festival, I was asked to participate in “A Prayer for the American Dream.” It was a gorgeous night in Red Rock Canyon, and here’s what I said: "I have a long history with prayer. I was taught to pray probably before I could talk, and some of my earliest memories are of…
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Give it up!
I belong to a GiVe group of women who donate a small amount of money each month. We don’t look very diverse (twelve white women in their 50’s) but we represent – and rather passionately – a range of views and beliefs. My friend Leslie launched a website to help folks start their own giving circles,…
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Pals on the bus
I grew up in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Spokane, Washington. For my family, it was a compelling community that also had a river, and glorious sunsets over that river’s steep banks, and just a two-mile walk to the downtown library. For the rest of the city, it was Felony Flats. Perhaps there was cause for that neighborhood…
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Yada yada . . . Yaddo!
Last month, Touchstone's associate publisher, David Falk, sent me a photo he recently took in the Yaddo library. Yaddo is an artist residency program in upstate New York, and I wrote a good chunk of We Are Called to Rise there. During that magical four weeks, I wandered into the library every single day. Its…
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Who was that grad student?
About a million years ago, when I was in college, I did my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf. It was an odd choice of topic - for an American Studies major – but my department was an easygoing place. They didn’t mind that I was preparing to launch my deepest academic work on a British…
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What will I write?
I have spent extended portions of my waking life in a dreamy state. When I am working on a new novel, the characters and their situations live in me. They grab at my attention and pull me away from what I am doing. They nip at my concentration, they beg for my awareness, they leave…
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Peace, Latasha
I recently watched the winner of the Oscar for best documentary: OJ Simpson: Made in America. I’d been avoiding it, because all these years later, that case still thrums a line of rage through me. For me, someone who had worked at the New Haven Project for Battered Women for two years, and was the…
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“On seeing a photo of the Antarctic – 2019”
"If it comes to this If one day, you are someone who cannot afford to see what everyone now sees If some day, everyone is someone who cannot see what everyone once saw If the wild abandon of our voyaging season has been brought to its own AIDS-like end Remember You can experience this…
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What one person can do
I've been meaning to post this short review I wrote of Bryan Stevenson's incredible memoir, Just Mercy. I was so very moved by this book. From Off the Shelf, May 3, 2017 Time magazine called Bryan Stevenson’s JUST MERCY one of the 10 best nonfiction books of 2014. The next year, it won the Andrew…
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I was thinking about courage
Writing is nearly always hard. Capturing inchoate ideas and feelings and experiences, forcing these into precise words arranged intentionally, demands fierce psychic energy: more with every passing year. It is tempting to say that the drain comes from all that is not expressed, all the ways that the words are less than what I feel…