writer and teacher
Today, at least, I’m writing about Boston in the 1890s through the eyes of a retired Congregationalist pastor who is about to have a nervous breakdown of sorts (or possibly a stroke, I haven’t decided yet). Here’s part of what he sees: That print was produced only three years before this character visited Boston to…
The gorgeous cover to the right of this text belongs to Elizabeth Loupas’s The Second Duchess, a historical novel inspired by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Since Elizabeth’s book will hit shelves on March 1, I asked her if she’d mind writing up some thoughts about her writing and research process, and about fictionalizing real…
Just a quick set of links right now, because I am actually, gasp, working on Killingly — and therefore looking at things like this, the most perfect and lovely map of the Massachusetts train system in 1898 that you could imagine, and this account of the architectural changes in Pemberton Square in the late 1880s.…
Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor’s School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked…
Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh. While I’m sitting on…
Kate Pullinger, whose The Mistress of Nothing will soon be released in the US, wrote a great post last week about historians who dismiss historical fiction (in this case, Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson): According to reports, Niall Ferguson says he never reads historical fiction because it ‘contaminates historical understanding’; Beevor says he thinks that…
Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis.…
Malinda Lo and Maggie Stiefvater both posted entertaining and useful accounts of their own takes on New Year’s resolutions. I’m not much of a resolution-maker either, but lists of goals? Oh dear. I’ve been using Basecamp to manage my to-do lists since last summer, and it now contains 11 separate lists, some of terrifying length.…
A brief break from Alcestis today to talk about novel #2, the one that’s still a twinkle in my eye, as it were. I haven’t said much about it here because I haven’t begun writing it yet — I’m keeping busy with the dissertation. I’ve researched and outlined it, and much as I wish I…
I’m just back from a conference and still stuck in the post-travel blahs — I was in Richmond at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and managed to get my flights screwed up by thunderstorms in both directions, sigh — but I wanted to share a few things: Via my…