On Christmas Day, after breakfast and gifts, my daughter Rebecca plucked Roald Dahl’s Matilda from the bookshelf and offered to read it to us. On the sofa, Mary was tying a quilt, Hannah lounging. Jack was tidying up the kitchen, and Mark and I were at the table, hard at the Christmas jigsaw puzzle. Matilda is a fantastic … Read more
At age twenty-five, holding my newborn infant in my arms, I discovered a remarkable truth, almost as if Hannah were speaking to me. The more you give, the more you get back. I had given myself in marriage and in childbirth, but oh, what I had received in return—a precious child! In those days, all … Read more
Podcasts (new-fangled radio shows) are hugely popular these days. Quilters love them! We access episodes on our computers or smart phones when we’re sewing, binging-listening to stories of true crime, scientific discovery, or mysterious phenomena. A podcast series specifically for quilters is “Just Wanna Quilt,” hosted by Tulane University Law Professor Elizabeth Townsend Gard. Dr. … Read more
The Friday evening after Thanksgiving, families who’ve been working on leftover turkey and pie all day gather downtown for Winterset’s Festival of Lights. They drink hot cocoa, warm their hands at sidewalk burn barrels, and stroll around the square admiring lighted store windows, buying their first Christmas gifts, and greeting friends and neighbors. Here, children … Read more
Independent filmmaker Jack C. Newell* (who happens to be my son-in-law) rolled into town late Monday night, en route Chicago from Boulder, CO, where he recently wrapped filming on his latest project, a dark romantic comedy titled “Monuments.” The story involves a road trip-heist-chase, so he and two crew members were capturing scenes along the … Read more
Because 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein,* articles about Mary Shelley and her famous novel are popping up everywhere. Having spent years studying Shelley, almost five writing my novel about her, I read them warily. You could say I know too much. Today, Lit Hub Weekly pointed me to a piece titled “My … Read more
In 1986, my latest, greatest quilt was Lady Liberty Medallion. I was thirty-seven years old, living on a farm in Madison County, Iowa, my children age ten, six, and three, many of my youthful dreams still intact. I didn’t know I would be divorced within two years, that from then on I’d be the head-of-household (and … Read more
During my years as a business co-owner and continent-crossing teacher of quilting, consuming fiction was a luxury only intermittently enjoyed. I probably managed only a dozen or so novels a year, reading them during air travel before Internet access on airplanes made working possible any place, any time. Now that I’m retired from Fons & … Read more
Quilters are nice people, but we can be snobs. When Liz Porter and I discovered patchwork in the mid-1970s, machine quilting existed, but self-respecting quilters eschewed it, pointing to ugly, puffy hotel bedspreads. We quilted our tops by hand. In the 1980s, along came the rotary cutter, followed by quick piecing techniques, which meant everyone … Read more
A friend—a quilter who’s working on his first YA* manuscript himself—recently reminded me of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling debut novel THE HELP. We were discussing our respective projects, and I described my agent’s early-on request for “comparables” (successful novels similar to mine). My book is structured (like FRANKENSTEIN itself) as a story within a story. The … Read more