As of October 18, my fourth novel, How to Save a Life, is officially out in the world. The plot involves a death, a pregnancy, and an adoption. Recently, a fellow writer said he thought it interesting that I, the same person who wrote about not being a mother here at Good Letters, had written a…

In my last post, “Aftermath,” I described the before-and-after experience of a recent trip to Los Angeles to pitch a drama series for television. Among other instances of what felt like divine timing at the start of the trip despite the dispiriting outcome by the end of it, there was one such instance that could…

My family moved to Sauk Village when I was eight years old. The town rode the border between Illinois and Indiana, an hour south of Chicago; its town motto was Pride and Progress, stamped on a blue concrete sign flanking the intersection of Sauk Trail and 394, the westernmost edge of town. We didn’t know…

In the last few years, my school has made a huge push towards what our Global Studies’ Director refers to as “glocalism.” In essence, glocalism encapsulates the idea that we are all of us citizens of various communities, both local and global, and that being glocal citizens entails envisioning ourselves as active members of both…

When I first began to think of myself as a writer, a few decades ago, I’d type onto file cards the wisdom of writers I wanted to emulate and thumbtack the cards to the bulletin board above my desk. I had several lines about the writer’s vocation by Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton. But the…

My sister died on a day when I was in Nashville. She went to be home, and I was five hundred miles from home, and another two thousand miles from my sister. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A one-to-three-months-to-live death sentence wasn’t supposed to only last two weeks, and vacations—taken in part as…

U’v’tuvo mchadesh bchal yom tamid maaseh breishit: In your goodness, day after day you renew creation. Even as an infrequent worshipper, I’ve said this prayer hundreds if not thousands of times since I began taking Judaism seriously more than thirty-five years ago. I like the concept: creation is dependent on creator; the creator may choose,…

This semester I’m honored to be teaching in a pilot program that introduces first-year students to the academic rigor and habits of mind of college, while also helping them to become more digitally sophisticated. All of the students receive iPad2s for participating in the program, which they then must use to complete many of the…

Whenever I pass old buildings with bricked up windows, I shake my head. Of all the architectural sins of the modern world, it’s the sealing of ingress and egress that bugs me the most. I can put up with glass boxes and weird shapes and wild uses of steel. Sometimes that’s part of the profession’s…

This is about a new film called Certified Copy. But it’s not a movie review. It could be. I could describe the story. I could tell you about its awards and honors. I could assess the actors’ performances (Juliette Binoche is better than ever, and William Shimmel, an opera singer, is arresting in his first…