From Literary Mama, October 2008

Last August, as my twelve-year marriage was falling apart, I went looking for the Little Witch books by Deborah Hautzig. I’d had witches on the brain lately. In her summer camp, my elder daughter was building a diorama of the Wizard of Oz, complete with tornado (wire operated by a crank), yellow brick road, poppy field, and ruby slippers. After my younger daughter and I dropped her off each morning, we’d cross a covered bridge to the wooded trails that backed Hamden’s Eli Whitney museum. There sat a tiny house used to store wood for projects such as the Oz operation. But Stella and I pretended that a little witch — a child witch, a nice witch — lived inside. We would knock on the door and wait, and then look up at the boarded windows. Read More

from A Tribute to Laurie Colwin in the New Haven Review

It’s 1993 and I’m sharing a studio apartment in the West Village with my boyfriend, who resembles no one so much as Statler and Waldorf, the balcony hecklers from The Muppet Show. I don’t know what to do with my new BA in English. Although I have no computer skills and I can’t type, I like to write. I like to read and talk about what I’m reading. I like to cook from my mom’s copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook. I present the results on blue-and-white ceramic plates. It occurs to me that I could learn to type—I could work for a magazine, maybe a fashion magazine. “What do you think?” I ask my boyfriend. We’re sharing a pie at Joe’s Pizza on 7th Avenue. He glares at me across the table. Read the full article at New Haven Review.