This year at the Southern Kentucky Book Fest I will be presenting a workshop on memoir writing on Friday afternoon and also be part of a nonfiction panel on Saturday morning.
The Best Photos of the Year
These are my favorite photos of the last year, with links to their blog posts (if any)—Sallie Little brother made up for Christmas play, my next book…: This Writer’s Life
Weaving the Past into the Present
My experience of discovering letters, diaries and writings left by my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, which became The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters.
Rude Awakening
I… felt the midwives, and Mrs. Breckinridge, were just as foreign to me, possessed of some vision, some energy I’d never encountered before. I felt very small and very ignorant among them.
Twin These Houses — The Blue Box
Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.
Neighbors…
The truth is that progressive ideas, whether about equality or water quality, have never taken root here; those are the seeds that fall on rocky ground, sprout and rapidly wither.
Icebox to Refrigerator
When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn’t know how to name.
Ten Favorites: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Ten Favorites: Can We Still Grind Corn?
Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Adrienne Rich and Colette
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.