VI. On Becoming a Writer: San Juan Acozac

That first day, walking along the dirt road through the village, I worried I might catch some dread tropical disease and die. We had already settled in where we would live that summer, the six women in a barn, its floor dirt, the one window a large open square without panes or curtains or a screen (we hung…

V. On Becoming a Writer: Appalachia

Well before I graduated from high school, I knew where I would go to college. Because of that, I applied to only one school, a small Methodist liberal arts college in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia. My sister had gone there for two years, and the day our family drove her down the long…

II. On Becoming a Writer: House of Pain

  I once heard it said that professional comedians have often survived painful childhoods. I don’t know if that applies to writers of fiction but certainly it was true for me. Before I was born, my mother contracted severe rheumatoid arthritis. Until then she had been a vibrant young woman, attractive and athletic, popular among…

I. On Becoming a Writer

Before I was 24, I had dined in the U. S. Senate Dining Room at a table next to John Kennedy’s, shaken hands with former Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, watched Bobby Kennedy interrogate witnesses in a Senate hearing room, crossed paths with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson on a Capitol walkway,…

My Paris

I first visited Paris on my honeymoon, a gift from my in-laws.  The first days of the trip, however, were anything but romantic. One of those in-laws had suffered a serious heart attack the night before the wedding, putting the honeymoon in doubt until his wife insisted we go. The next night, our wedding night, was spent…