Women of Ingenuity

Women of Ingenuity

“My failures have been errors in judgment, not of intent.” Ulysses S. Grant

In true one-thing-leads-to-another fashion, an interview online recently with Drew Gilpin Faust about her memoir Necessary Trouble, led me to another book she’d written, Mothers of Invention. Having grown up in the South herself, Faust has a unique perspective on the idiosyncrasies most identified with the elite society of women who carried the dying planter culture through the Civil War on their own narrow shoulders. I’m naturally aware of how much of her work would be banned in southern schools by our strained society today, ironic remembering as I do my own great aunt telling me how the true outcome of the Civil War was removed from books in the South. She had to visit her married sister in New York to experience the shocking truth that the North had truly won the war. Her school books in Augusta, GA had kept that fact from her. You see, anyone can play that game, but it never ends well. Continue Reading

The Artist’s Prerogative

The Artist’s Prerogative

“…and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”~ Pico Iyer We’ve heard an enormous amount recently about the pandemic of loneliness sweeping much of the world today. For the most part, the reasons for it seem to stem from the breakdown of community, and therefor human connections.… Continue Reading

Warp and Weft

Warp and Weft

“We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone… and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.”—Sandra Day O’Connor For many years, I’ve considered layering in writing as a process much akin to that in the visual… Continue Reading

Badass!

Badass!

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.-John C. Maxwell How can a word used to describe someone have such different meanings depending on the gender of the one being defined? That just proves how much discrimination there is in society’s expectations for its different members. I’ve focused… Continue Reading

Open Invitation

Open Invitation

“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien Some powerful examples of the serendipity and discovery of research dropped in my lap recently with the announcement that the man who occupied much of my last book, Tried As Silver, and was an implied romantic connection for the protagonist (we’ll never really know), had… Continue Reading