: About Me

I'm your average college-educated stay-at-home mom in rural America: mother of twins and a singleton, full-time cook, housekeeper, laundress, chauffeur, and homeschool teacher. But that's just my day job. No, wait, it's also my night job. I'm a poet and I work in a local winery on weekends, even though I know nothing about wine. My husband is a software engineer and brews beer, about which I also know nothing. As for religion, my father was an Episcopal priest but my mother's family is Jewish. Reflecting my genetic compromise, I join my favorite authors Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis in traditional Anglicanism, a branch of the Church that was born out of compromise. I know ALL about compromise.

My passion is ...

Archaeology

I know too much about ...

Handbells and psychology

My parents always told me ...

Be gentle with your sister!

My childhood ambition ...

was to be a critic (as told by my 6 year old self to a kind but patronising gentlemen in McDonald's)

My favorite memory ...

Stranded by a fuel strike for a week in a Somerset cottage while on vacation in 2000, and forced to watch the Olympics.

Why I write ...

To justify a bachelor's degree in English

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Reading histories and biographies, catching up on 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1, listening to my daughter play piano

My first job ...

Selling shoes

My best moment ...

The first time our twins slept through the night (still rejoicing, 18 years later)

My inspiration ...

God's faithfulness in getting me through this mess called life

Arts & Humanities > Writing (Other) Is writing slowly becoming a lost art?

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Just how many arts can this society afford to lose? Certainly the domestic arts have suffered serious setbacks in the last century, and are now the province of specialized "artisans," who dedicate themselves, like living museums, to keeping ancient knowledge alive. Are writers going the way of the quill pen? Are we well on the way to an anonymous, impersonal society? I tried an experiment in being personal last summer. Instead of emailing a friend in Texas, I sat down with pen and stationery, and wrote her a real letter in longhand. I didn't use abbreviations to shorten my labor or emotico...

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