Just a quick note to say that I’ve made it to Colorado with one husband, two pairs of red shoes, three cats, four hundred fantasy novels, five dozen skeins of yarn, six wilted houseplants, an eighty-year-old violin, and a few large bottles of porter. I have my priorities. Speaking of porter, almost as soon as […]
One Last Look
After digging up the perennials and donating half of my furniture to charity, we packed all my books and cats and yarn into a small moving van, and on Thursday we left the house in Wisconsin for good. When I was teaching in Scotland, I once found myself on a train to Glasgow, sitting next […]
WisCon 35
Memorial Day weekend, we drove east to WisCon, Madison’s one-and-only feminist science fiction and fantasy convention. WisCon is my favorite con: great programming for fans and academics and writers, a strong and very real sense of community, and lots of old friends. And there was cheese! (More about that later.) WisCon 35 was really the […]
Chicago weekend
We went to the Chicago for Easter weekend, and the sun was shining in the city. The skies were as blue as Chagall’s stained glass windows. We strolled through the old neighborhoods where my husband used to live, taking in the museums, the aquarium, the planetarium, and the jazz clubs. And when we left on […]
Cabbage Rose Linoleum
Eight years ago, when I moved into my house in Wisconsin, I fell in love with the vintage linoleum on the second floor. Strewn with pink cabbage roses the size of my fist, the (secretly awesome) floor in the master bedroom caused some of my friends to gasp aloud. “This is a floor to repel […]
Thundersnow
We had wild, apocalyptic weather this week. Sleet, hard rain, cold winds that blew my umbrella apart, thunder and lightning, noisy hail pounding at the skylights, and then snow. Lots of heavy, flocking snow. I got up on Wednesday before my alarm, knocked all the snow from my crushed and sagging arborvitae, shoveled the driveway […]
Going home again
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot Four Quartets I grew up on a sheep farm outside of Fargo, and that city, on the edge of the North Dakota prairie, is my home. I say this even […]
What to keep
Moving into a new home is a lot like editing a manuscript: you need to achieve a total clarity about your goals, so you can figure out what to let go and what to keep. A few years ago, I made a pass at revising an old story I’d written, and I kept too much. […]