When I’m deep in the first draft of writing a new novel, I don’t typically read other authors’ fiction for pleasure. What about other novelists? Do they? And has becoming a novelist interfered with their fiction-reading pleasure? I investigated. “I read like a coyote loose among sheep…” To read the rest in…(Read More)
California!
by
From September 16 through October 4, I’ll bring Shining Sea home to California–home because that’s where the story opens and returns, and where Barbara Gannon and her five children all have grown up. San Diego, Berkeley, Sausalito, San Rafael, and Los Angeles… Please check the events page for details, and hope to…(Read More)
Little, Brown is holding a book giveaway on Goodreads, from July 14 to August 7 — thirty copies of the paperback edition of Shining Sea are up for grabs! Free to enter… what’s to lose? To read more and try your luck, go here…(Read More)
“A man-made rill lined with local river stones flows between the grasses, opening into an eye-shaped pond that both looks up at the clouds and reflects them, before continuing on its little way.” I wrote about a private garden on a grand hidden estates outside Geneva, Switzerland, redesigned by landscape design firm Wirtz…(Read More)
“To me, freedom is being able to choose a career path based on vocation rather than the fear of ending up without medical insurance.” For my op-ed in USA Today on being a writer, being an expat, endometriosis, and universal healthcare, please look here…(Read More)
“To me, freedom is being able to choose a career path based on vocation rather than the fear of ending up without medical insurance.” For my op-ed in USA Today on being a writer, being an expat, endometriosis, and universal healthcare, please look here…(Read More)
Twenty-five copies of the paperback edition of Shining Sea, before it comes out on August 8, are up for grabs on Goodreads. Deadline is June 29! To enter, look here…(Read More)
“I want to understand human beings, what makes them who they are and why they do the things they do.” The Woolf sent me some of the most incisive questions on the craft of writing, the researching of Shining Sea, the influence of expat life on my work, and writerly responsibility I’ve ever received…(Read More)
If you read Commonwealth by Ann Patchett and are looking for similar reads, The Seattle Public Library suggests you pick up Shining Sea. Having read Commonwealth, I’d agree! Some other great suggestions on the same list–books by Angela Flournoy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ayana Mathis, Anne Tyler, Tiphanie Yanique…. Very nice to have Shining Sea…(Read More)
Anyone who wants to understand anything about the US prisoner-of-war experience under the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII needs to read this narrative feat by authors Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Switching between the minutely researched stories of a young American cowboy and artist named Ben Steele–whose experience informed the character…(Read More)
