I lead a book club, a small group of church friends who enjoy letting me challenge them with a variety of diverse and beautiful books. We have made it through a wide variety of stories, from Jason Reynald’s Long Way Down to Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was over discussion of Virgil Wander (by the brilliant…
Bedtime at our house is often rushed. Especially as the springtime moves along and the evenings push themselves later and later, the last month of school is full of days in which we play too long outside and have to throw the kids in bed so they can get out of them again in the…
As a child, I actively avoided sports. A bookish child in an active family, sports and games were an uncomfortable opportunity for embarrassment in the Southern humidity. My parents, though active (think water skiing and dirt bikes), were not particularly sporty, and didn’t sign us up for little league practices or soccer camp. They watched…
I recently finished Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri, and it is already one of my favorite books of the year. In the style of a true Persian story teller, he cycles back and repeats himself often, giving refrains and themes to the patchwork of stories he weaves together. That’s what he calls it,…
We’ve been taking walks through our woods, my family and I. To my inner Southern child, these Pacific Northwestern woods still seem a place of great magic and mystery. Douglas firs, planted in neat rows intended as Christmas trees many years ago, now overgrown and towering over dark, mushroomy and ferny expanses where the sun…
When my oldest son was three and a half, he taught himself to read. He is that sort of person, one to take all the individual parts and put them together on his own. He does the same now with math equations, piecing the world together, while I try to give him the tools he…
