My new novel Never Coming Back has been in the world just over a month now. I’m grateful to the readers and reviewers who have responded to it with such heart. If you are one of them, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d post a positive review on Amazon or Goodreads. Never Coming Back is on the Midwest … Continue reading Never Coming Back: Free Skype visits to your book club!
This semester I taught a class about creative writers, identity and race. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and race sat in a huge square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. We were strangers to each other. On the first day … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Alberto Rios
After a reading from my new novel Never Coming Back the other night, I spoke with a woman in the audience about synesthesia, that syndrome whereby senses cross and fuse with each other. “So as someone is talking, you don’t simultaneously see the words they’re saying inside your head?” I asked the woman, and she shook … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith
Yesterday my faithful companion and I were out for his twice-daily walk, and by “walk” I mean amble. Wander. Meander. Pete is fourteen years old now, and the boy who used to tear around the lakes for hours on end, never tiring, with me half-jogging to keep up, and who would then come home to … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Mary Oliver
A long time ago, far away, a wiggly baby dressed in a little purple-and-white striped number was handed over to me. She took one look at the tall, strange woman holding her and squinched up her face to cry. Who could blame her? But I quickly whispered to her that it’s okay, it’s okay, … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
The cabin on Turnip Hill Road that I bought when I moved back home-ish to the Adirondacks was one room. Two hundred and fifty square feet, which, spelled out like that, looked bigger than 250. (Never Coming Back, p. 10) Fifteen years ago, you signed a series of legal documents faxed to your home in Minneapolis. … Continue reading Never Coming Back(story):
The memory of a night the spring of my senior year in high school flooded into my head. I had been out at a party, one of the constant parties that seniors seem to have, the same franticness to all of them, as if time were running out. (Never Coming Back, p. 140) Dear sixteen-year-old self, … Continue reading Never Coming Back(story): Letter to my sixteen-year-old self
How well can we ever really know one another? Faulkner’s famous, ferocious question has been with me throughout my life. It was one of the guiding lights behind my new novel Never Coming Back (out on October 10), a book about the relationship between two people –Tamar Winter and her daughter Clara– who, despite their profound … Continue reading Never Coming Back(story) #1
a journal of growth, change & experimentation
Reflections from an Older Perspective
Goodies from my mailbox and camera
Telling all sides of the parenting story
Waking Up to Your Dreams
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Alison McGhee 