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There are NO DRAGONS in This Book

For story time at our house, the six-year-old grandson gets to pick out the books. He has a limit of three books per night. We have two shelves of books, but he has a cache of favorites he returns to time and again. I consider this an “in the wild customer satisfaction” survey. A consistent winner in this survey is There Are NO...

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Vonnegut

When I was in high school, I favored a small library located in a strip center. The library shelves began as soon as you walked in the door. From my weird spatial perspective, the library arranged the books backwards—the cataloguing began at the front desk, placing the fiction authors whose names were at the end of the alphabet closest to the...

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The Joy of What If

I had two inspiration points for When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women. (Of course, I did–it always has to be complicated with me.) Both involved “What If.” This concept is when we set our imagination on “Go” and take off. At least it is for me. The joy of What If has inspired tons of novels, often in the...

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The American Daughters

I have fallen in love with…. I love stories that re-tell American history in a way that, had we not always written the past with a White male pen, we’d know was the way it might have happened. The American Daughters by Marcus Carlos Ruffin which retells how the years leading up to the Civil War unfolded in New Orleans is the latest novel I...

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Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature

The birth of the new is exciting. When that birthing happens in an arena you dearly love, it’s even more exciting. Such is the case with Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature. I built my writing career on literary journals. That was the way you did it when I was starting out. You submitted to journals and hoped you got lucky...

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Love Song to Cities

I was reading a book out in the world and an observer asked me what it was. The City We Became, I told her. Then she wanted to know what it was about. “Blah, blah, blah,” I said, ending with, “It’s about New York City.” I have now finished the second, and final, installment in the series by N. K. Jemisin, The World We Make. I...

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