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...
I love eccentricities. I will value you if you are kind, witty, and a good listener, but if you sing off-key with gusto, wear a signature bow tie, or tend to laugh at your own jokes, I will love you even more. After all, when Albert Einstein’s doctor forbade him from buying tobacco for his pipe, the genius circumvented his doctor’s orders by stooping to pick up discarded cigarette butts...
FROM THE ROAR TO THE STENCH: IN PRAISE OF JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR The Women’s March on Washington transformed America’s women. After January 21, 2017, women ran for office, launched non-profits, and raised their voices like never before. Thousands of women had descended on the nation’s capital, arriving by plane, by bus, by car, by motorcycle, by skateboard, by foot. They were wearing sneakers...
My Easter Wish for You – Rolling Back the Stones (Written for an Easter Service at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Dayton, Ohio) A stone, officially defined, is simply a piece of rock. What characterizes it, to my mind, is its hardness. Stones may be large or small, heavy or light, rounded or irregular in shape, but all of them are hard. ...
I’m a visual learner. And pictures, the kind called visual images, show up in my books. In KINSHIP, the important visuals are the trailers in Happy Trails, the trailer park setting for the novel. In UNCOMMON FAITH, the important visuals picture groups of women stitching and the quilts that display directions for the Underground Railroad. In FALLOUT, the important visuals include the...
Diane Chiddister always intended to write fiction, but it was a long journey between her MFA in fiction writing from the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1981 and the publication of ONE MORE DAY, her first novel. In between, she’s been a journalist, serving as a reporter and columnist for the YELLOW SPRINGS NEWS. Until retirement, Chiddister had served as editor of the paper for...
“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” is a series of blogposts whose goal is to support writers by answering a question readers often ask. Today’s blog introduces Carol Siyahi Hicks and her debut novel, The Color of Acceptance. The idea for Hicks’s book is rooted in her experiences in the 1960s civil rights movement. As a 19-year-old college student, she had traveled south to...
