Archive for the 'Ephemera' Category

This blog has moved

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

My blog has moved over to my main website, michellerichmond.com. The website has been completely redesigned so that new, featured posts now appear at the top of the page. Additional posts can also be found at the bottom of the page under the headings “News and Notes” and “From the blog.” I also now have [...]

You need a chiller

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Holy smokes, The Year of Fog headlines The Daily Mail’s list of sizzling summer reads. I’m in swelteringly good company with Ian McEwan’s Solar, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and Harlan Coben’s Caught. The British edition just came out last week. (In England, No One You Know came first.) It’s fun to see The Year of [...]

This one goes out to Sally in Minnesota

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Over at Pause, Sally Howell Johnson writes beautifully about her reaction to the boxes of photographs in antique stores, the false sense of beauty or perfection created by digital photography, and a quirky family tradition.
But the one thing I cannot bring myself to look at in these stores are the boxes of old photographs. [...]

Making it True

Monday, July 19th, 2010

E.B. Davis on “Writers Who Kill” weaves two of his recent reading experiences, along with the story of his first published fiction, into an interesting mini-essay about what it means to be an authentic writer. Congratulations to Davis on the publication, and thanks for the nod!
I’ve written for years. At first, I hesitated to call [...]

Before the oil, there was jubilee

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Last Friday night, in the town of Monroeville, AL, birthplace of Harper Lee, I found myself sitting beneath the stars on the lawn of the old courthouse, watching a wonderful local performance of To Kill a Mockingbird. At a reception following the play, at a lovely bookstore and cafe called The Bee Hive, I met [...]

The Mystery of Houses

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

My husband and I first saw the house on 38th Avenue in the Outer Richmond in August of 2004, while I was pregnant with our son. The moment we walked through the front door, we fell in love. Within a month we were busily setting up the nursery and landscaping the back yard to take [...]

Flirting with Married People

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Just in case you’ve ever wondered what happens when a whole bunch of writers get together, Steve Almond lays it out for The Rumpus, in the aftermath of the annual sort-of literary free-for-all known as AWP. I have to say, it’s my best cameo yet, hands down. (Dr. D! Dimplelingus? Really? I’ve never tried it, [...]

San Fran author revisits beloved characters

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

San Francisco author K.M. Soehnlein has a new novel out, Robin and Ruby. Readers first met Robin MacKenzie almost nine years ago in Karl’s debut novel, The World of Normal Boys. In that book, which received the Lambda Literary Award, Robin was a 13-year-old child of the seventies attempting to find his place and his [...]

Virginia Utigard Video: Did she kill her 7 children?

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Here is a video from 1978, in which Virginia Gratto, now Virginia Utigard, is interviewed the morning after her husband and seven children were killed in a house fire in Cohoes, NY. An unemotional-seeming Utigard says that she fled the fire and couldn’t get back into the house. Strangely, she adds that she would have [...]

Ode to the Unglamorous Book Tour

Monday, March 15th, 2010

A hotel in Tuscon…

Booknotes, Litlife, & Writing Prompts from bestselling author Michelle Richmond