(an original short story) Two days before the bicentennial and Madeline Harper’s tenth birthday, someone rowed an eighteen-foot Statue of Liberty constructed entirely of Venetian blinds and plywood across the rocky Susquehannock River and mounted it atop a crumbling stone railroad pier two hundred yards from shore. No one knows how it got there. Not …
(fifth in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER & THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM) Lorita Foster and I met late August 2003, when she interviewed for a position in my district’s English department. It had been a chaotic summer. Our principal was out on an indefinite, health-related leave and my six-member department had been …
While I’m away, a story from the archives… To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being. — Iff to Haroun in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun …
I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I do like the idea of resets and fresh starts. In that spirit, I’m trying something a little different this year, sharing not only stories about books that matter to me, but those that matter to my reader friends, an occasional series I’m calling BOOKS THAT MATTER …
My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann 