writing
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Spark Anthology Arrives
I have a short story in the new Spark anthology. I mentioned it before. My friend Brian Lewis, who was at the CalArts summer school with me, founded the journal this year, as a way to showcase CSSSA grads (and others). It officially comes out tomorrow, but you can get an e-copy or preorder right…
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Spark: A Creative Anthology
As regular blog readers know, 20 years ago, I attended the California State Summer School for the Arts at CalArts in Valencia for creative writing. I count this as the single most transformative educational experience of my young student life, a month when I got to hang out with other artists and concentrate solely on…
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The Writer and the Whale: An Overactive Imagination
After Cadillac and I got back from our trip, I regaled the kids with tall tales about Cadillac. My kids’ motto, like the X-Files, is, “I WANT to Believe.” They love hearing stories and sometimes believe them, even if they are far-fetched. And they often add onto them, spinning them into Paul Bunyan-Babe the Blue…
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Bakersfield and Tehachapi
Cadillac said a couple weeks ago that he had to go to Bakersfield to audit some offices. At first I thought he’d become a Scientologist (da-dum-dum!) but then learned he had to go look at paperwork in credit unions and banks or something like that. I don’t really know. He starts talking about work, which…
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Women’s Fiction Writers Interview
Amy Sue Nathan interviewed me on her blog yesterday. I love the title she came up with! Go check it out.
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Going Home Again
Who says you can’t go home again? I did just that last week when I visited the San Carlos Library, my old childhood haunt. It’s where I went for the A/C in the summer, where I spent frantic last minutes searching through card catalogs for research papers due the next day, where I pretty much…
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A “Roses” Sermon
My friend Kathy Patrick of Beauty and the Book and the Pulpwood Queens wrote to me a couple weeks ago, letting me know that her pastor, Allison Byerly, used The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns in her Sunday sermon in Jefferson, Texas. How cool is that? She cited page 251, where Dara talks…
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CSSSA at CalArts
Last Friday, I stepped back onto the CalArts campus for the first time in 20 years. I went to the California State Summer School for the Arts there (CSSSA, which people call “SEE-SAH”), during the last possible chance I had to go, after I was done with high school. I studied creative writing there– it’s…
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Corona Library
On Saturday, Cadillac and I headed up to the Corona Library to do a program. Corona is a city in Riverside County (I think) that used to produce a lot of oranges. The city was built around a circular road (a crown, i.e. Corona) and therefore has many big beautiful Victorians and other houses. We…
MARGARET DILLOWAY 