Shaping a Fellowship

Back in 2010, my husband and I attended our first (and the first!) Hutchmoot. It was exciting, and a little surreal, to contemplate a face-to-face gathering of a fellowship that had formerly been confined to my computer screen. Read More ›

Baskets of Fragments

In October 1949, a brassy New Yorker named Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a staid London bookseller named Frank Doel.

“I am a poor writer,” she told him, “with an antiquarian taste in books.” Read More ›

For the Greater Good

An artist friend and I had a long talk a while back about the types of people that make up the human race.

According to him, most people fall into one of two camps: Read More ›

Interview: Jennifer Trafton, author of Henry and the Chalk Dragon

Jennifer Trafton’s much-anticipated Henry and the Chalk Dragon is a romp through the “what ifs” of an imagination run wild. It’s a companion for children feeling self-conscious about Read More ›

The Craft and Courage of L.M. Montgomery, Pt 4

In this final installment, I want to say a few words about Lucy Maud’s personal challenges as a writer. Even a casual perusal of her journals reveals the fact that Maud was a creature of intense, sometimes crippling moods. I don’t think anyone could be capable of communicating the full scope of human joys and sorrows like she did without being intimately acquainted with both the heights and the depths. Read More ›

A Voice in the Dark

In broad daylight, I like to say that I’ll bet that my barn is haunted. Read More ›

Staff Work of the Omnipotence

I gave in to a cold a few weeks ago. It had been pursuing me for days, ever since we got home from Hutchmoot, but it finally caught up with me. This meant, among other things, that we did not go to the boat for the weekend, and we did not Read More ›

Seeds of Love

(I wrote this last December, and while the circumstances are different this year, the sentiments are not. Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.)

I am so sick of death. Read More ›

The Craft and Courage of L.M. Montgomery, Pt 3

Here in Part Three, I’d like to take a look at how Montgomery accomplished her magic in very practical ways, and how the rather quotidian components of people, place, and work ethic all added up to some of the most beloved fiction of the twentieth century. Read More ›

The Craft and Courage of L.M. Montgomery, Pt 2

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote 22 novels, 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. And by the time of her death in 1942, she was a household name, not just in Canada, but all over the world.

So, how did she do it? Read More ›

The Craft and Courage of L.M. Montgomery, Pt 1

Combing through an old notebook of ideas one day, Lucy Maud Montgomery came across this entry which she had copied from a newspaper clipping: Read More ›

Lark Rise to Candleford

The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn… Read More ›