To paraphrase Nick Hornby, My desert-island, top-five most memorable books in chronological order: 1. Escape to Witch Mountain Tony and Tia were different. (Didn’t we all feel that way as kids?) They could both read minds and had telekenisis – they could move objects with their minds. That was a talent I tried to practice as I suffered silently at the dinner table. Instead of paying attention to what was…
After I read Celeste Ng’s debut, Everything I Never Told You, I started thinking about writing fiction for real. It wasn’t that I had any delusions about writing quite as beautifully as Ng does. It was more that the story she told–of family members who loved each other, but didn’t really know each other–moved me so intensely. So, after I finished it, I started writing my own multi-generational (and highly…
It is not very often that a work of fiction makes me cry, but that’s what happened when I read Langston Hughes’ “Cora Unashamed,” a story in one of Hughes’ short story collections, which was made into a television film as part of the Masterpiece Theatre American Collection starring Regina Taylor and Cherry Jones. Cora is an African American housekeeper in the early 1900s isolated in an all-white town in…
You always hear people talking about muses whispering in their ear, as if in a trance, or their “characters” speaking to them. Well, I’m not a novelist so I don’t have characters to take over the heavy lifting of writing, but I will say that it feels like someone else wrote up my book proposal. I had been working for a while on a memoir about my infertility, based on…
I can point to many sources of inspiration for my novel, The Talking Drum, but one of the major sources of inspiration was an incident that occurred about 10 years ago at my church, Myrtle Baptist, in West Newton, Massachusetts, during a meeting of the history committee. We were making plans to create a commemorative book on the history of the church in celebration of its 135 years in existence….
Is it possible to be a debutante more than once? In my case, the answer is yes. When I was 17 years old I was selected as a debutante for the cotillion sponsored in my hometown, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Dressed in a white ballgown, white elbow gloves, white pumps, pearls, and with my hair in an upsweep, I waltzed with my dad, did a modern dance with my escort, and had…
I’m beyond thrilled to introduce you all to your new Friday blogger, Amy Klein! Amy is the author of The Trying Game: How to Get Pregnant and Get Through Fertility Treastment Without Losing your Mind (Ballantine, 2020) based on her New York Times Fertility Diary column. As soon as I read her application, I knew I wanted her to be on the Debutante Ball, and now I’ve got my wish. It…
Aloha! I can’t believe it’s been a year since I first joined the Debutante Ball. Mahalo to the previous class for giving me the opportunity to work alongside K.A. Doore, Martine Fournier Watson, Layne Fargo and Stephanie Jimenez, as part of the Class of 2019. I had no idea what kind of ride to expect as a debut author, and it was truly wonderful to be part of the DB-Hive….
I have two manuscripts in the drawer. Although they’re not actually in a drawer, and I have no idea where they went. They are so old now that I know not if any current software could even read them, so I’ve pretty much abandoned the idea of ever looking at them again. This may be for the best. The first time I wrote a book, I sat down…
Aloha I no longer have my computer or the bulk of my writing before May 2010, but I since I started anew in 2011 I have amassed quite a stash of words that will never be published. Since I am a proud workshop junkie, I’ve had the opportunity in the past eight years to generate stacks of bad poems and two manuscript-length works of prose…
