On November 13 and 14, I’ll be giving two author readings from my recent narrative travel work, in a pair of Zoom-based literary events for local organizations. This summer, I served as the 2020 Writer-in-Residence at Arrowhead, the historic home of Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For two months, I had the opportunity to work,…

Who’d have guessed a place like this could be the result of a fortune made in toilets and other plumbing fixtures? Say hello (or perhaps cheerio) to Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, a stellar Trustees of Reservation property located right on the Atlantic Coast in Ipwich, Massachusetts. Castle Hill in Ipswich is one of the…

A warm, slightly sour aroma fills the kitchen on a Tuesday morning. My husband, Floren, has made it out of bed before me, and he’s baking bread. This is a rarity not because he’s Spanish and often stays up, a book propped on his lap, till nearly midnight. It’s unusual because our jobs normally separate…

My husband and I have jobs that keep us separated by a cool couple hundred miles during the week. I’m in upstate New York, and until recently, he was living out on the North Shore of Massachusetts, an area I happen to love. When his company announced they were picking up stakes and moving to…

For nearly a year, I’ve been working on a project with Columbia Economic Development Corp. (CEDC) that has taken me all around Columbia County in upstate New York, to write travelogues about each of the county’s often-underrated towns. Because I’ve been spending so much time getting to know Columbia County, I haven’t given my own…

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: we’re all getting a little punchy, and we’re only 19 days or so into our COVID-19 social-distancing efforts. I’ll skip the commentary on what this means about us as a species; even a dedicated introvert like me can admit that wanting to stay in is a lot different than…

Out and about isn’t a phrase I’m using much these days, as we complete our second full week of near-lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak in New York State—unless I’m referring to taking a walk around my neighborhood or on my town’s rail trail. Like many avid travelers, I’m feeling the strain of being, well, constrained,…

  The pantheon of horror fiction has included several prominent women authors, from Mary Shelley to Daphne du Maurier and Anne Rice. But it has long been a man’s game, usually told from a man’s perspective. When male horror writers’ main characters are women, they’re often prototypical Good Moms, rather than fully realized people—that is,…

  For the past six years, I’ve submitted speaking proposals to a small group of hand-picked conferences—ones I know will not only provide good exposure, but will also allow me to network with professionals in my field and learn something new and valuable. As I’ve discovered where my time and effort (and travel dollars) are…

  There are a few universal truths about divorce. It’s always unequal, with one person doing the leaving and the other person being left. It’s a legal headache, from the dissolution of the relationship to the division of everything from assets to furniture, to financial entanglements like alimony and child support. If there are kids…