I mentioned to my Pulitzer finalist poet husband that I wanted to write this post about envy being a grave disease for the writer’s mind, and he glanced up at me with a serious yet playful smile and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Every writer feels it.” Sigh. Here is my brilliant husband who has been nationally recognized for his talent and he too knows what it feels like to compare artistic merit and careers with other writers. I always hoped poets were immune from this kind of t

What’s a great way to gain weight? Sit at a desk for four hours every day writing away at a novel that may or may not turn out as you’ve outlined it and sold it to your editor based on that outline, and then read for a few more hours in bed, and eat a lot of ice cream from the stress of writing on a deadline. Yeah, that’s what happened to me while I was working on The Whole Way Home. Thankfully, all turned out well in the end. I finished the novel and am very proud of it. Wri

I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, a city much more beautiful than it sounds. My mother was a voracious reader, and though we couldn’t afford to buy new books often (library junkies, yes we were!), occasionally she would take me to the Little Dickens bookshop where they sold new and used books. I loved the smell of old paper pages marked by dust and fingerprints. I like the smell of new books too, but there’s something about the human connection captured in a used book that mo

I meet so many talented, intelligent women who will repeat to me exactly what I wrote above. But they, and myself included, often feel doubt