My birthday has come and gone, and here I am, another year older. But am I wiser? That’s a question I like to ask myself. I’m not sure I have an answer though. Of course for me, the answers never come quickly—my mind doesn’t work that way. Even when I taught every day—a subject I…

On Wednesday, October 22, 2008, I decided to take over what had been, at that time, my husband’s blog. Tim is a fabulous and gifted writer, but he’s not a consistent writer. And in those days, my plan was to “update a blog once a week so that [our] little ‘buckets of sunshine’ [could] be…

Literary journals uphold standards by following a style guide. Literary Mama uses The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) as its guide, though we do have our own in-house style guide for a few items. One of the standards we follow is to italicize book titles. That choice might seem inconsequential to you, but to someone…

Grocery stores and the people inside don’t know how special they are to me. Honestly. My experiences at grocery stores are legendary! Okay, well, not legendary, but one encounter led to a moment of human connection and another to a novel. And those are just the moments I wrote about. But as my family will…

Well, friends, we’ve had another interesting year, have we not? Here we are, two years into this pandemic, a year past vaccinations began, and we’re still hearing complaints about mask usage and vaccine mandates. We’ve proven that vaccines work (if you’re vaccinated, you might get a breakthrough case, but it looks like you won’t be…

Her name is tucked between those of two friends in the acknowledgment section of my debut novel. If you don’t know to look for it, you might miss it. But I know her name is there. Diane Dougherty and I met only once in person over twenty years ago on one of my first visits…