I’m the woman who left a dream job as Column One editor at the Los Angeles Times because I wanted to move to Maine. Go figure how happiness works. Former editor of Nieman Storyboard. I love music almost as much as (and sometimes more than) beautiful storytelling, so expect to see that here too.
It was Southern Week here on Storyboard, spotlighting some wonderful regional journalism and writing. It’s been fun tweeting out great lines from famous Southern writers, including this one from William Faulkner: “I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, … Read more
Sometimes, when the world is too much with us, we just need a love story or a laugh. This week, Storyboard obliged with lots of both. We talked to the writer of a viral Modern Love column in The New … Read more
Why is it great? Yesterday was Dorothy Parker’s birthday. (She would have been 124, reminding me of her classic line, “Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”) The line above is one of my favorites, because … Read more
This has been an unsettling week. Who will forget the look on that one Charlottesville marcher’s face, a terrible echo of the hate seen on other faces as Hitler rose to power in Germany and blacks began to win their … Read more
Why is it great? Here in E.B. White’s Maine, August is bittersweet, bringing whispers of summer’s end even at the height of its ripeness. Apples, the fruit of fall, begin to color on gnarled trees. Bright yellow goldenrod sprouts around … Read more
Empathy is one of the greatest gifts a journalist can have. If you come by it naturally, you can actually feel what your subject is feeling, and that can be a painful burden sometimes. But even if you have to develop … Read more
A few days ago, I had the disturbing experience of stepping barefoot on the bloody, decapitated body of a mouse. My first reaction was of course a back-wheeling step away from the corpse. My second was to clean off my … Read more
Why is it great? First off, the rhythm of the sentence makes me swoon. I keep reading it aloud, to hear how it swirls and swirls like dancers on a ballroom floor before coming to a rest, softly, on the … Read more
The annual Maine Lobster Festival is underway, so it seemed like a good time to go big on lobsters. Of course, festival organizers might not have been huge fans of David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” piece for Gourmet magazine. And … Read more
Why is it great? Nabokov is masterful here, not just stylistically but emotionally. He interrupts Humbert Humbert’s grotesque pursuit of Lolita by having him address the reader directly with an abject plea for understanding, a jarring moment that makes us … Read more
