No, not THAT kind of jam session

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No matter how many summers I’ve done this, every time I make a batch of raspberry or blueberry jam I’m astonished that I can produce something so practical, delicious, and beautiful. I leave the newly filled pint jars out for days, admiring my handiwork. (And reminding my family to, as well.) I do have some advice for you. Don’t take the dog berry picking. Or at least don’t take my big old retriever Forte. He eats berries like a hungry black bear right off the bushes, and if I am not paying attention will root them right out of my pail. Also, buy one of those wide plastic funnels for pouring the boiling goo into the jars. They keep it from running over onto the counter and oozing into, say, the silverware drawer. Don’t ask how I know that.

-Heather

Excerpt From Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende

I’ve leaving in a few weeks for a vacation with extended family at a beach house that we’ve rented for a week. Do you have any tips for surviving the week with family while still having fun?

Thanks,

Beach Mom

Dear Beach Mom,

What you need is a project.  Fathers, fathers-in-law, and grandfathers in particular need some handy little project they can complete together over a case of beer.  They’ll be out there for hours and they won’t speak, except to ask whether there’s an extra charger for the cordless drill, but somehow they’ll have a great time and feel like they’ve bonded like never before.

Pick something non-essential so it doesn’t feel like too much of a chore.  For instance, can you pour concrete paving stones and have the kids embed seashells in them?  That’ll get the guys working on mixing concrete and the kids collecting shells.  (This assumes, of course, that you’re not going home by train and could actually bring some heavy paving stones back with you.)

Or get everyone involved in building a sculpture of found art.  There’s something about driftwood that brings out the sculptor in all of us.  Somebody will have to be handy with a glue gun, a drill, or rolls of wire. A spot of bright sea-green paint might be in order. Be sure to incorporate “found” garbage into it, so that you’re leaving the beach cleaner than you found it.   (Here’s a hint:  Start one of these projects by yourself, and take the Tom Sawyer/Aunt Polly approach of being highly skeptical about whether anyone else is really qualified to help. That’ll get them begging to participate.)

If you can’t bring your sculpture home with you, perhaps the owners of the beach cottage would appreciate a piece of yard art.  Failing that, take inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy and create an art project out of natural materials that will simply wash away with the next high tide.

Amy Stewart is the author of From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, and the New York Times bestsellers Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers and Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. Find more from her at Garden Rant.

Submit your own horticultural question to Dr. Bleedingheart by emailing it to: katie [at] algonquin [dot] com

I’m attending a housewarming party for a young couple who love good food and outdoor entertaining. I want to get them something useful and enduring–maybe to help with their garden or to use in the kitchen. What’s new in the world of DIY home and garden products? Or would it be best to go with an old standby?

Thank you,

Giftless

Dear Giftless,

Ah, yes, the socially awkward housewarming gift.  You bring a nice bottle of wine to someone who has a giant wine cellar, and it’s like delivering a truckload of manure to a dairy farm.  Bring the same nice bottle to somebody who drinks their wine out of a box, usually over ice and sometimes with a splash of Sprite on top, and—well—it’s like delivering a truckload of manure to a studio apartment.  Either way, it’s unappreciated.

But the phrase “outdoor entertaining” is encouraging.  It’s not quite the same as “gardening,” is it?   “Outdoor entertaining,” like “outdoor living,” is one of those trendy phrases that suggests that a person might have a garden, even if they don’t actually do any gardening.

And for those people for whom “garden” is a noun, not a verb, the solution is easy.  This time of year, one simply cannot have too many herbs in one’s outdoor entertaining space.  Go down to the garden center and pick up as many interesting varieties of basil as you can find.  A good garden center will have Thai basil, purple basil, lemon basil, a small-leafed Greek basil, and the regular broad-leafed basil you see everywhere.  Buy a simple clay pot for five to ten bucks, cram all the varieties of basil into one pot, and you’re done. Don’t worry if they’ve already got a herb garden—no one can have too much basil.

Amy Stewart is the author of From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, and the New York Times bestsellers Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers and Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. Find more from her at Garden Rant.

Submit your own horticultural question to Dr. Bleedingheart by emailing it to: katie [at] algonquin [dot] com

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From the author of Lucky Girl, Mei-Ling Hopgood

I can’t help but do a double take when I see a little Asian girl holding the hand of her white parent.

Thirty years ago I was that child, an adoptee from Taiwan growing up with two blue-eyed, Caucasian parents and two Korean brothers in Michigan. Back then we were a novelty. Now, it seems like I see families like mine everywhere, from a clothing store in Manhattan to a Little League field in central Illinois.

Over the past two decades, international adoptions have become commonplace in the United States. More than 268,000 children have been adopted from abroad since 1991. China has topped the list of native countries, followed closely by Korea and Guatemala. Even in a city as diverse as New York, these families stand out for their composition, which challenges all preconceived notions of family, and for their eagerness to try to compensate – and overcompensate – for their racial differences.

It’s understandable that many parents of international adoptees want to make their child’s “native” culture a part of their lives. I know the value in being proud of one’s heritage; my own mom and dad hung Asian art on our walls, took us to ethnic festivals and restaurants, and enrolled my brothers in Korean school for a time.

Sometimes, despite their good intentions, parents can take things too far. Hidden in their instinct to bring their child’s culture into the home is a real danger: the danger that we wind up idealizing a culture and family that many adoptees never really knew, while neglecting the actual, more complex experience of being Asian in America.

Thirty years ago, adoption professionals preached assimilation and a “love is color blind” philosophy. That didn’t work; after grown adoptees shared stories of struggling with isolation, self-hate, and racial taunting, the drumbeat changed. Now, the buzzwords are culture, culture, and more culture. Many countries, such as China, now mandate that families who adopt their children maintain their native culture.

So parents are left to puzzle through. Many have told me they feel guilty for taking their children from “their culture.” One mom even said if she could become a Chinese woman, she would, for the sake of her child. Sociologist Heather Jacobson said that many mothers with children from China profess a deep connection with the country of China, its traditions and people.

Still, I’m willing to bet that many adoptees – if they are anything like me – will end up relating more to the Asian American experience than to the traditions in a far-off land that they have no memory of.

When I was a teen I had no interest in Taiwan or my Chinese birth family. As a young adult, I met my birth family. I bonded with my biological sisters, felt intoxicated with the bustling city of Taipei, and learned Mandarin. Still, I came to understand I didn’t “fit in” completely.

For me, the language, cultural, and emotional barriers are simply too great.

Parents who ask me “how much culture” they think they should “give” their children must remember: culture is not inborn. It’s organic and must evolve over time. While it’s important to embrace where a child comes from, it is also essential to recognize that their current experience as an Asian in America is just as authentic and interesting as the one they might have had in the land of their birth.

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Opening Day at Old Macdonald

“I guess I took a lot of putts, but they didn’t seem like putts.  They were more like approach shots.” — Overheard remark by a golfer who was describing his round at Old Macdonald

There’s an established ritual for the opening of a new course at Bandon Dunes.
All the golfers sign a log as they await their turn on the tee.  They’re presented with a sleeve of balls with the Old Macdonald logo, and coin stamped with the date — and a bas relief of Charles Blair Macdonald poised at the top of his backswing.
Then, when their time comes, each foursome moves to the tee where they are greeted by Mike Keiser.  But he’s not the only one on the tee.  Co-designers Tom Doak and Jim Urbina were both there for a while (but Tom soon drifted off to watch how people played the course), along with other key people in the resort’s short history — Hank Hickox, the GM; Josh Lesnik, president of KemperSports; Shorty and Charlotte Dow, who were the unofficial hosts for the development before the first ground was broken.  Each group posed for a picture with Mike (taken by Wood Sabold) and a film crew was on hand, too. The whole atmosphere was welcoming and personal — even as it added to the first tee jitters.

In this post I’m not going to try to sum up the experience of Old Mac, but everyone in my group — everyone I talked to — marveled at the greens.  They are mind-boggling.  I’ve come from lunch with a group of well-travelled golfers who were trying, and failing, to come up with a course that has greens so big and so turbulent.  And I didn’t talk to anyone who minded the size of the greens, or minded three-putting.

In our group, the most memorable shots occurred around the green.  I’ll mention only one, on the 8th hole, the Biarrritz green.  I was standing at the front of the green when my partner, who’d come up short, played his ball out of the valley in front of the green.  It looked good from the moment it started rolling.  I watched it travel across a green that has to be at least 50 yards front to back.  As it made its way through various hollows and crevices, it disappeared three times — three times! — like a train going through a tunnel.

That’s what I call a triple peekaboo, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one before.

Check in later for more on Old Mac.

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Reposted from Stephen Goodwin’s Dream Golf Blog

We asked him a few questions for our blog, and he happily obliged.

1. Describe your new book in one sentence.

The story of Bandon Dunes, America’s newest and most unusual golf mecca, and the people who created it.

2. Where do you do your best writing?

In my studio, with its view of trees, backyards, and passing trains.

3.  What is your motto or maxim?

Breathe deeply.

4.  Do you have any secret skills (besides writing, of course?)

It’s not a skill exactly, but I am an avid gardener, or farmer, and my half acre has fruit trees — apple, pear, and cherry — as well as a a vegetable garden (tomatoes, peas, carrots, arugula, peppers, eggplant, squash, zucchini), a herb garden, and a full range of old fashioned flowering plants (hydrangea, lily, roses, astilbe, hosta, ferns, spirea, boxwood, rhododendron, azaleas).

5.  Describe the plot of the first story you remember writing.

Soldiers are waiting to go into battle.  Their names are Curly, Joe, Bobby, and Mac.  They’re tense and sweaty inside the belly of the Trojan horse.

6.  If you had to change professions, and needed no credentials, what would you do?

I’d be a conservationist of some kind, trying to make sure that some part of our glorious planet stayed healthy.

7.  Which band would you like to have follow you around, playing the soundtrack to your life?

The Band.  They have been following me around most of my life (in a manner of speaking).

8.  Where do you hope to catch people reading your new book?

Anywhere.

9.  What is your all-time-absolute-favorite book?

Once upon a time it was Cat’s Cradle.  Remember that?  Nice, nice, very nice.

10.  What books have you read recently that you’d recommend?

Sherman Alexie, War Dances. Anything by Jim Harrison. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace.

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Book Notes – Joshua Braff (“Peep Show”)

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

While I read Joshua Braff’s new novel, Peep Show, I was continually reminded of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You (in only the best of ways, after all, Tropper’s book was one of my favorite novels last year). Both are comic novels that explore the tangled relationships of dysfunctional families.

Peep Show pits a father’s seedy 1970′s Times Square against a mother’s budding Orthodox Judaism in a novel both comic and tragic. Through the eyes of their son, the family struggles are vivid yet realistic in this stellar book.

Booklist wrote of the book:

Although Peep Show could be a heavy-handed family drama, Braff chooses to keep the story light, sketching several funny but poignant scenes, as when David’s father liberates Debra and her friend Sarah for a beach weekend in Atlantic City, with David’s mother in hot pursuit to prevent the girls’ corruption. The comic thrust, however, never detracts from the novel’s intimate peek into a divided family, and the lesson of compromise the family members—especially David and his mother—learn is necessary to keep all ties from dissolving.

In his own words, here is Joshua Braff’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel, Peep Show:
Why these songs, you ask? The novel, my second, is called Peep Show. It’s about a family from the suburbs of northern New Jersey in the 1970′s and a place called Times Square that no longer exists the way it once did. A concentrated circus of sin, smut, sex and stench that all heated up in the sweaty-humid New York summers into a cocktail of everything your parents ever warned you about. I lived in Hell’s Kitchen for a year, 43rd and 10th Ave, while I attended NYU in 1989. Times Square would soon be Disney-fide but while I was there it was still breathing smut-fire. I brought a lot of my memories of my time there into Peep Show. So, let’s go through it.
“The E Street Shuffle” – Bruce Springsteen

How do you start a compilation of songs about a family from New Jersey without Bruce? He’s featured three times on this list, partly because he’s New Jersey’s Allen Ginsburg and partly because of his ability to write short stories in the time it takes to sing a song. The poetry and pathos and grit of a Springsteen song is all you need for a successful tale of love and loss and all that ends up under your fingernails when you’re firing up your Chevy and heading out on that lonesome highway, under that Jersey sunrise, thinkin’ of a girl, while runnin’ from mistakes. Character plus story plus texture plus the ever-present “teenage tramps in skin-tight pants do the E Street dance…” Gotta love the Boss.
“Life on Mars” – David Bowie

My book begins with a splash of Bowie who was also known in the 70′s as Ziggy Stardust. There’s a poster of him in full Ziggy lipstick above my protag’s bed. I have always loved this song and all that Bowie represents in the history of rock. In my mind he flew his freak-flag with amazing dignity and always kept his shoulders back, knowing that everything he was saying was true and right and just – even though he was a walking nightmare for any conservative parent, teacher or lawmaker. I will never tire of that sweeping chorus – “Sail-ors fighting in the dance hall – Oh man! Look at those cavemen go – It’s the freakiest show – Take a look at the Lawman, beating up the wrong guy – Oh Man! Wonder if he’ll ever know – He’s in the best selling show – Is there life on Mars? God bless Bowie.
“Sing A Simple Song” – Sly & the Family Stone

You cannot crank this song on any stereo and not move some section of your body in a repeated, gyrating motion. It’s one of those tunes that captures the era and the religion of funk and soul in its first few notes and never, ever lets go. All that with lyrics that encompass the words Talkin’ and Walkin’ about a hundred and eight times. When you play it, play it loud! And remember, always dance as if no one is watching. Especially to this funky arse tune.
“One Way Or Another” – Blondie

I get the sense that true Blondie fans would disagree that “One Way Or Another” was her best tune. I admit I remember it most from the radio and it was overplayed like all classic hits of their time. I have found that it’s one of those songs that’s held up beautifully and the guitar riff is just awesome and has traces of raw punk-rock in it. When really sitting down with the lyrics, I see it’s about a girl who is oh so disappointed with her man. I think she wants to feed him rat poison and just get him off her mind. She’s gonna find ya, win ya, get ya, meet ya, lose ya, and then, “Lead you to the supermarket checkout, some specials and rat food, get lost in the crowd.” Yikes. Sexy, pissed-off and super dangerous. My kind of girl.
“Hot Stuff” – Donna Summer

Donna never had any trepidation telling the radio listening world that she was as horny as a jackrabbit in late May. “Gotta have some hot love baby this evenin’.” And we knew she meant THIS evening, like time’s a wastin’, I need some hot (not chilled, not vanilla) but some hot hot hot lovin’ this damn evening, like within the half-hour would be ideal. “Hot, hot, hot, hot stuff.” In truth, the girl scared and enthralled me. There was a sense that if you were the luckiest pizza delivery boy on this God’s earth, you’d end up at Donna Summer’s house and she’d be ready. Oh, trust, me she’d be ready. But would you?
“Boogie Shoes” – KC & the Sunshine Band

If you’re talking the 70′s and music, you have to include KC and his bellbottom-wearin’ Sunshine Band. Plus, I mention this song in Peep Show. It’s on the radio while my characters are on their way into “the city.” In the same way that Martin Scorsese uses great late 70′s and early 80′s tunes in GoodFellas and other films to evoke the texture of the time, this song is one of those that everyone seems to know and can sing immediately when prodded. While men were getting their hair blown back with hairdryers in an attempt to get their wings just perfect, KC was always pouring from the radio, still years away from getting bloated on fame and trying to outlive the death of disco. I hear he still tours and does so with authority.
“Tiny Dancer” – Elton John

Oh my God I love this song. Who doesn’t love this song? Somehow tragic, somehow life affirming. “Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band. Pretty eyes, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man.” This girl he builds in this epic song is a person I’ve written about often in my career. She is sometimes a girl, sometimes a teenager and she’s always got way more going on for herself than anyone gives her credit for. But it’s also important to note that she is also a classic example of the unreliable narrator which means she’s capable of bullshitting even you, the reader. I grew up with lots of “tiny dancers” it seems, and as a young teenager some of them flashed their pirate smiles at me, even with their boyfriend’s right around the corner. I attribute a great deal of my “oat sewing” to this wonderful breed of Jersey girl. The girl named “Beth” in my first novel, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, is my quintessential “seamstress for the band.”
“Walk On The Wild Side” – Lou Reed

There was a time during writing Peep Show that I had the opportunity to talk to Lou Reed about his life in Times Square during the 70′s. It never happened, I can’t remember why but he is the ultimate person to discuss such matters with and all that he writes about in this song is exactly drawn from the textures I was attempting. His character’s names are, Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Jackie and the Sugar Plum Fairy. They give head, take Valium, hustle, hitch-hike and pluck their eyebrows, all while “taking a walk on the wild side.” What else is there to say. Lou Reed really got it. And still gets it. Did you see him rocking out with Metallica on that Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame show? He’s a great icon.
“Candy’s Room” – Bruce Springsteen

“There’s a sadness hidden in that pretty face, a sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe.” Yeah, that’s all I’ve ever tried to evoke in fiction. An established character’s hidden emotions, the things she cannot and will not let herself or anyone else see, touch, kiss, assuage. Springsteen’s gift lies in the intricacies of the human condition. Capturing it and then fitting it into a four minute song is a whole other animal. He’s special and the world never has to stop hearing his work, his voice.
“I Want To Be Sedated” The Ramones

On the topic of more diluted pathos, we have the Ramones who true-blue punk and rock lovers swear by and will tell you so with their fist in your face. Yes, it’s very true in rock that derives from punk – less is often so much more. I wholeheartedly agree that bare bones simple riffs and steady-eddie drumbeats can make for some very important music. The Ramones are New York. The Ramones are punk rock. The Ramones are important and should not be forgotten when discussing the growth of the tree that is rock n’ roll. “Ba-ba-baba, baba-ba-baba, I wanna be sedated.” God do I know how that feels. I wish I was sedated this second. Back to work.
“Tangled Up In Blue” – Bob Dylan

Wow. These lyrics could melt steel. Dylan. The story is so rich, the music somehow as tender and familiar as a prayer you’ve been singing since birth. Again, a girl who once wore her hair this way and then time passes with high, tumultuous winds so she ends up in that place, you know, that place that you ended up too, and then. “She was standing there in back of my chair, said to me, ‘don’t I know your name?” She studied the lines on my face. I must admit I felt a little uneasy, when she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe. Tangled up in Blue.” A side note, the working title of my first novel, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, was Tangled Up In Jew. It was meant to remind to keep the book light, funny, to be careful of the murky murk.
“Mother’s Little Helper” – The Rolling Stones

I have a music-freak-friend who swears that all things rock n’ roll start with The Rolling Stones. There are so many good songs, so many epic riffs and in every tune a blatant understanding of what rock is and was and should be. They are so true to their amazing work. Peep Show, to some extent, is about figuring out how you’re going to live your life and how those that raised you will assist you in this effort. This song is about a little pill that makes things easier for a time. And we all use this pill, in its many varied forms. And then…”Doctor please, some more of these, outside the door, she took four more. What a drag it is getting old.”
“The Sounds of Silence” – Simon and Garfunkel

Can’t leave these boys out, no way, not in a novel about New York. They are so important in the scheme of things. Important for song writers, poets, those that construct music, and story tellers. Lonely, lonely New York City, so huge and crowded and still my thoughts and fears are unheard. I see I’ve written the word “important” twice already and writers are supposed to avoid repeating words. But Simon and Garfunkel have always, I mean from very early on, been important to me. Just having their albums in vinyl in my house makes me feel…right. No story writer should go without. “And in the naked light I saw, ten thousand people, maybe more. People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, and no one dare, disturb the sound of silence.”

New York City Serenade: Bruce Springsteen

Some randomly plucked words from the lyrics:

“Railroad tracks, Cadillac, boogaloo, Broadway, Manhattan, midnight, promenade, cornerboys, money, mama, baby, vibes man, jazz man, junk man, trash can, serenade, deeper blue, in your grave, save your notes, hook it up, Singin’, singin, singin’, singin’.” Nuff said.

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Thanks to Largehearted Boy for today’s post.

I have recently adopted some pet snails.  Now they are having snail babies! The soil in the terrarium has little tiny bugs in it; I think they might have come from a medium-sized stick I put in there. I want to replace the soil to get rid of the bugs, but am a little concerned about moving around or touching the snail eggs. Do you think it would be okay if I took them out really quickly to clean out the terrarium?

Signed,

Living with Snails

Dear Living,

Wow.  And I thought it was weird to keep earthworms as pets.  Are you sure that these snails were, in fact, really up for adoption?  I’d hate to think of their snail families searching for them all night long, leaving “Missing Snail” slime trails on the sidewalk in hopes that someone will see their cry for help and bring their loved ones back.

But let’s assume that your snails are happy in their new environment.  After all, they’ve started a family.  Most snails, as you may know, are hermaphrodites, so as the eggs hatch you’ll get to witness a glorious experiment in communal, gender-free child-rearing.  Sounds like a good topic for a book.

As for the tiny bugs and the cleanliness issue:  These are snails!  They don’t want you to clean up after them. They want to live among dirt and muck and rotting leaves.  The presence of bugs, spiders, worms, and other living creatures will only make them feel more at home.  Will the bugs eat their eggs?  Maybe.  But that’s nature, and snails, after all, are part of nature.  For all we know, the snails are going to eat the eggs.  Let it go.

If you want to clean up after a pet, get a puppy.  But if you’re raising snails, make their environment as earthy as possible.  Embrace the mess.  Sure, the French place snails in sterile containers filled with nothing but cornmeal to clean out the snails’ digestive systems.  But then they eat them!  And that’s no way to treat a pet.

Amy Stewart is the author of From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, and the New York Times bestsellers Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers and Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. Find more from her at Garden Rant.

Submit your own horticultural question to Dr. Bleedingheart by emailing it to: katie [at] algonquin [dot] com

1. Describe your new book in one sentence.
It’s a memoir set in tiny Haines, Alaska, about faith, friends, and family–and how I was run over by a truck and got better.

2. Where do you do your best writing?
At my desk on the stair landing of my house, on a laptop, with two fingers.

3. What is your motto or maxim?
The Golden Rule. It’s a goal I rarely meet, but I try.

4. Do you have any secret skills (besides writing, of course)?
Country & Western radio DJ.

5. Describe the plot of the first story you remember writing.
It was called Gloria’s Last Ride and was about a woman who rode a dead, frozen horse like a sled down a hill in Haines and off the dock in January. I won a prize for it at the Southeast Alaska State Fair.

6. If you had to change professions, and needed no credentials, what would you do?
I’d become an architect. I love designing houses and public buildings.

7. Which band would you like to have follow you around, playing the soundtrack to your life?
Asleep at the Wheel (and some days John Cage).

8. Where do you hope to catch people reading your new book?
On an Alaska state ferry.

9. What is your all-time-absolute-favorite book?
Is this a trick question? Should I say Pride and Prejudice which I’ve read several times, or anything by Anne Tyler and Ellen Gilchrist since I love them? I can say that Irene Hunt’s young adult book, Across Five Aprils, was the most influential.

10. What books have you read recently that you’d recommend?
Elizabeth Berg’s Home Safe, Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Cod Magic, and The Fall of the Year by Howard Frank Mosher.  I am also addicted to Alexander McCall Smith’s series.

1. Describe your new book in one sentence.
A memoir about listening to the voice in your heart.

2. Where do you do your best writing?
Very early in my upstairs office at home or my back-of-the-building office at PineStraw Magazine. I’m a super-early riser, the result of being a newspaperman’s son and cutting my teeth on an afternoon newspaper.

3.  What is your motto or maxim?
Pay attention. Life is subject to change without notice.

4.  Do you have any secret skills (besides writing, of course?)
Gardening, landscape work. Probably should have been a professional yardman.

5.  Describe the plot of the first story you remember writing.
The story of a young city kid who spends the summer with his crusty widower grandfather in the country. I wrote it in high school after my grandmother died and won, unexpectedly, the city short story writing contest.

6.  If you had to change professions, and needed no credentials, what would you do?
Easy. Landscape designer.

7.  Which band would you like to have follow you around, playing the soundtrack to your life?
James Taylor and his band.

8. Where do you hope to catch people reading your new book?
Anywhere–as long as they’re enjoying it.

9.  What is your all-time-absolute-favorite book?
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. (A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, close second)