In the Wall Street Journal's "Five Best" column, I present my picks for the five most scandalous boarding school novels:
My publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, let me take over their Twitter thread one day to talk about some of the inspirations for characters and places in Grievous. You don't need to be on twitter to view this -- and there are photos, most taken by yours truly back in the day.
In the Footsteps of the Inklings: A Conversation with H. S. Cross and Carol and Philip Zaleski
We discuss J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the role of faith in literature today. Read the interview.
The blog Strong Language gave me a chance to discuss the word fag in its non-sweary usages, and also to explore the origins of its "strong language" use.
Over on Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips blog, I write about using em-dashes to set off dialogue, the history, the how, the why.
Read.
My last year of college, I got to take a playwriting seminar with Adrienne Kennedy. A petite, soft-spoken woman, she made it clear without quite saying so that our work together was of sovereign importance, so crucial that she could waste zero minutes on niceties, bureaucracy, or our anxious Harvard strivings for success.
Read more (and scroll to bottom of linked page for this piece)
Beneath its old-fashioned exterior, Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) radiates transgression.
Marshal Zeringue's site, Writers Read, asks what I have been reading lately. I wrote an entry in April 2019.
On writing what I don't know:
Novels should not be read as memoir. Still, whether the novelist writes what she knows or what she imagines, her words can conjure a realer reality, one more potent and less illusory than our present distraction. What mind does the page reveal? A 21st-century American widow up to her neck in building renovations, or a band of Englishmen up to their necks in cricket and Latin…and other matters not suited to coffee hour or a family newspaper?