I first began imagining the story of the ‘offal boy’ over ten years ago. In a sermon, Richard Venus, the minister to whom this book is dedicated, shared an apocryphal tale about a community of French Huguenots escaping persecution in 16th century France by sailing across the English Channel to safety in England. Within sight of the coast, their boat sprung a leak and began to...
CONGRATULATIONS to Victoria Harrison, who accepted my challenge to write and submit a longer piece to be published on my website. Here it is! Victoria took part in a Girl Scout badge-earning project I conducted for the Fanny Seward Girl Scout troop on September 20, 2025 at the invitation of the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York. All the girls worked hard on their journal entries, but...
Letters When I was a child, I used to spin a wobbly globe and let my finger come to rest on exotic places: Borneo, the Gobi Desert, the Bering Strait. Then, using the thin whispering airmail paper my father brought home from his office, I would pen letters to imagined people there. I would stuff them into old envelopes and stamp the outside with rubber stamps marked “Rush” and “Fragile,”...
b “’Optimism,’ said Candide, ‘is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly.’” -Voltaire, Candide Optimism, quite frankly, suffers from a bad name. This has been going on for quite some time. All the nasty people, it seems, go down in history: Benito Mussolini, the Marquis DeSade, Atilla the Hun, Donald J. Trump. All the cheerful ones repose in obscurity. This is a...
Compassionate Marketing: One Simple Tip for Helping Yourself and Other Writers Compassionate Marketing: It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Right up there with those jumbo shrimp and original copies? Although we are currently in a time of turmoil in which everything about writing is changing for everyone, there was never anything compassionate about publishing and its handmaiden, marketing...
Some may consider it a dubious honor, but I consider it a great privilege that my first novel, Spite Fences, has been banned in many schools. In fact, on a list compiled by the National Council of Teachers of English, it is sandwiched between Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (my very favorite among her books) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (my all-time favorite book ever written in the...
Coming to a Website Near You! The Book Trailer Hits the Marketplace Ahhhh, the good old days. Once upon a time, writers like me were treated royally by their publishers. My children and I were once swept off to California to receive the International Reading Association prize (Spite Fences). We were feted at an American Library Association Award event at the Rainbow Room in New York City...
Thank you, Nancy Pinard, for the invitation to participate in MY WRITING PROCESS BLOG TOUR. MY WRITING PROCESS I am currently working on the final proof pages of my very first biography,Fanny Seward: A Life. It will be published in December 2014 by Syracuse University Press. It differs from other biographies in the genre in that Fanny Seward is a little-known historical figure. Most...
I was recently at a writers’ conference at which Lin Oliver, the “founding mother” of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, offered some tips from successful writers. One of those tips that resonated with me was advice from Susan Patron, a former librarian and winner of the Newbery award in 2007 for The Higher Power of Lucky. Her advice to struggling writers was to...
Here’s a piece of counter-intuitive advice for beginning fiction writers: practice with poetry! Fiction writers understand the need to show, not tell. They just don’t always know how to pull it off. Telling, of course, robs the reader of the joy of experience. A beginner might write, “I was devastated by my mother’s death.” A more practiced...
