the long-awaited kitten post

I apologize for the Blair Witch quality of the kitten photos.  But they do illuminate some true things: 1.  My camera spends too much time at the bottom of my enormous purse–down with the pretzel crumbs and dessicated granola bars. 2. A small person in my house (and I’m not naming any names) threw the […]

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my sister’s birthday

My big sister is about to have an important birthday–and to honor it, and her, my mom and dad and I went through our old family photos to make a little video retrospective. This photo, in particular, is knocking my socks off.  I’d never seen it until my mom gave it to me for the […]

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handcrafted buildings

I’m obsessing over this amazing slideshow of photos of this charming cob house in Texas today!  The New York Times just did a profile of it, and it’s so much like a house I stumbled on at the Children’s Garden in Ithaca, New York, when we were just on vacation there.  My  kids were playing […]

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life on the D-list

> Just got a message from my publicist at Random House that there’s a section of Kathy Griffin’s Bravo show My Life on the D-List that has my book cover in it!  She has a book coming out with Random House, and she filmed a segment of the show at their offices.  And right behind […]

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here’s where we’ve been on vacation:

This photo says a lot. But I’ll add these words, as well: Wildflower garden. Yacht club. Farmers’ market. Alpaca farm (with chickens!). Also: 75 degree weather. Gorges, and streams, and a lake. Grandparents. And this, too: Lucky, lucky, lucky.

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writing wednesday: life with kids

Here’s a Writing Wednesday about life with kids.  The question comes up over and over:  How do you do both?  How do you get it all done as a mother and a writer?  And almost every mother with little kids I know struggles with some version of this question.  How do you get it all […]

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caroline carefully arranges everything she holds dear

I found a link to this painting at live.life.create.art today and I’m totally breathtaken.  The artist is Amanda Blake, and I just want to stare at this painting all day.  Really, I want to go inside it.  I’d love to know how to paint like that: to know how to make a paintbrush do that…

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you left footprints

Here’s a little photo poem.  The image here comes from one of my very favorite sites, Square America, an online collection of found photographs and snapshots.  And the text comes from something I wrote years and years ago…

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video: 100 things I am grateful for

It’s been that kind of summer.  The kind where it seemed like a good idea to make a list the things I am grateful for.  I set out to make a list of 100, and once I got going, it seemed it would be just as easy to list a thousand. But I stuck with […]

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Favorite quotes from Everyone is Beautiful

A reporter asked me last week to put together some of my favorite quotes from Everyone Is Beautiful for a story she’s doing.  And so I did.  I’ve been writing new stuff, and blogging, and goofing off with my kids this summer–and it had been a while since I’d spent any time with Everyone Is […]

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revising a draft

Here’s me, yesterday, revising an early draft of a story.  This is what it looks like early on–lots of writing all over the page: arrows, carrots, scribbles.  Then I go back and type in what I’ve written.  Then I print it out and write all over the typed pages again, over and over until it […]

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style with style

I grew up with The Elements of Style, but I guarantee my copy was nowhere near this gorgeous. Maybe it’s time for a new one. I might need to get it for the illustrations alone. These illustrations are by Maira Kalman, who also has a gorgeous and super-fantastic illustrated blog for The New York Times. […]

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writing wednesday! too much coolness is not cool

This Writing Wednesday is about naming characters.  And why you have to do it carefully and not just buy a baby book and pick out your favorite names. Here’s the main point of the video (and you’ll notice that I DO NOT actually SAY IT in the video): Characters and names have a relationship to […]

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