My Writerly Life

Tag: Writing

  • COMING HOME

    It feels like a homecoming of sorts this return to blogging—a great love that got lost in the minutiae of the last couple of years. So let me welcome you back, invite you to follow along, and tell you what to expect. But first, I guess I should account for my absence. I doubt it…

  • MY FAVORITE READS

    My reading preferences have always bent toward literary novels, and over the years I have devoured some of the great works, like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. In the last 10-15 years, I shifted my focus to modern works that had a chance of earning a coveted place in…

  • HARDING: THIS OTHER EDEN

    Paul Harding roared onto the literary scene in 2010 by winning the Pulitzer for his first novel, Tinkers—a beautiful work of art marked by its rhythmic prose reflective of his musical background. Harding’s third novel, This Other Eden, certainly maintains his reputation for lyrical, complex writing that forces you past the surface plot into deeper…

  • THE CRAFT OF WRITING

    Let me start with an admission that no writing conference would dare ask me to lecture because I am far too blunt with young writers. The average conference wants every kind of budding author to come, enjoy, return; I want to share the truth about the rigors of our craft. I have this firm belief…

  • GET BACK ON THE HORSE

    Because of my Texas beginnings, I suppose, I have this fascination with westerners who have a rural or ranching background, move out and up in the city environment, but retain their love for and lessons learned in their beginnings—and I often write about western women. When Betty Sue Morris was a young girl, she was…

  • SEBASTIAN BARRY’S SPATE OF WORDS

    It is difficult to explain why I like Sebastian Barry’s mournful Booker Prize-nominated On Canaan’s Side better than his current Booker-nominated Old God’s Time, and why all his other lauded works fall somewhere in between, but let me start by saying that Barry is masterful at the craft of writing. In the past I have…

  • IT ALL STARTED WITH GOLDIE RIPPER

    Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog, “My Writerly Life,” which pretty much encapsulates my nearly 84 years. I hope you will read along and perhaps “Follow” my weekly posts, and share your own reading habits and inspirations. I was not born knowing I was a writer, but I was an inveterate reader from a…

  • COMING SOON . . .

    No, not the circus, or a movie, or a new hotel—a new blog entitled My Writerly Life, with squibs about literature, the arts, people, things that inspire me. An introductory blog will magically appear 9/13, and a review of Sebastian Barry’s new Booker Prize nominated novel on 9/17. But you do not have to remember…