The stones are gray and sandy brown, scoured and pitted and cracked by time and salt air. During my week here, the sky stays a pale, cold blue. The North Sea is surprisingly calm. Long diagonal ridges of rock—craigs, the Scots call them—expose themselves like bony spines at low tide and slip underwater at high.…

The other night, I got home from my writers’ group feeling jazzed. After struggling with a story revision, I’d decided to show them something different, twenty-five pages of new nonfiction. “I loved it,” they said, and “This is what you should be writing.” Comments and questions, too, but in general a big thumbs-up. I dropped…

When I was growing up, every Thanksgiving weekend, my grandfather took the whole family—two sets of aunts and uncles, my parents, my brother, and me—to Carmel-by-the-Sea. We stayed in the same old rambling hotel with the Mexican-tiled grand staircase and the upstairs hall carpeted in a pattern of cabbage roses perfect for playing hopscotch. We…

A friend is dying. She’s older, my mother’s age. I’ve known Georganne, as I’ll call her, since my first book was published and she asked if I’d like to give a reading at the private library where she was a trustee. Her voice struck me on that first phone call with its bossy-but-breathy quality, no-nonsense…

City living involves carving out paths—the well-worn routes we travel each day. Whether on foot, behind the wheel, or in the seat of a city bus, we come to anticipate the landmarks of daily life. The construction on the house on the corner; the For Sale sign that becomes Sold; the usual panhandlers and Street…

I stole the title for this posting from Joan Didion. One reason I stole it was that I like the brevity of the phrase: In Bed. There you have two short one-syllable words that share a precision, and the precision they share is this: here, now. And, yes, I stole those two sentences, too, from…

In A Book of Silence, writer Sara Maitland begins her journey into the different kinds of silence by following the example of the desert fathers and the anchorites—she leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye, she traveled to the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights), she forced…

In A Book of Silence, writer Sara Maitland begins her journey into the different kinds of silence by following the example of the desert fathers and the anchorites—she leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye, she traveled to the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights), she forced…

Last week, the New York Times carried a story about President Obama on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Not hard news—far from it—the story offered assembled tidbits of press coverage as reporters hung out at local bars and T-shirt shops and golf courses hoping for views of POTUS. Two tidbits in particular struck me: Obama, unlike…

As a child, I made a child’s sense of the Trinity: God was an old man with a long white beard who controlled and saw everything (ick!); Jesus a confusing blend of baby, carpenter, and robed king on a cross; and the Holy Ghost a deeper-voiced, more powerful version of Casper. Some forty years later,…