1. Lucky, The Backstory: A Grassy Field and a Basketball Goal
I wrote my Doris Betts Literary Award winning story Lucky some eighteen years ago. I had just stepped down then…
I wrote my Doris Betts Literary Award winning story Lucky some eighteen years ago. I had just stepped down then…
Our group wasn’t the first such program in this area of Charlotte. Before I came out there, the church already…
It wasn’t long before more volunteers arrived and the Cambodian pastor and his congregation moved to the same site. Soon…
It began with a beach trip. Loading up the ministry bus, which the Cambodian pastor drove, we spent several days…
My goal as a volunteer had been to remain with the program until the first participants, still the core of…
Fiction is fiction, which means it doesn’t require absolute historical accuracy. But serious fiction writers often want to convey a…
A novel that melds both history and fiction may at times seem paradoxical. But in the broader definition, this is…
When I began writing fiction, I never thought of myself as a historical novelist. Yet my two published novels tell…
I recently read The Blood of Emmett Till, an extraordinary book by North Carolina author and historian Tim Tyson. The…
When I began revising an old manuscript that became A Stone for Bread, I found myself wondering if one more…
In my last post (see post here), A Stone for Bread‘s protagonist American Henry Beam and several American friends attend a…
The world’s great religions understand human fallibility and address it in varying ways through the Torah, the Christ, the Koran…
Years ago when I was teaching at Greensboro College, I attended a guest lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin where she…
If you’ve never read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, now might be a good time. It’s the classic…
I end my series “On Becoming a Writer” in North Carolina, where I have lived since leaving New York. I…
After seven years in South Carolina, I cashed in my small savings, rented a U-Haul and moved my few belongings,…