-
Art, Artisans, Awesome Women, Cat Stevens, Crafts, Educating Rita, Field of Dreams, Fiftieth Birthday, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Willy Russell
if my books could talk to you …
While I have moved past the demise of the typewriter and the tape deck, the resurgence of the turntable reassures me that we will ever be entirely without our books. I love books. I love how they look, the way they feel and smell, and how it was that they came to be permanent fixtures on someone’s bookshelf. A minute or…
-
BRCA genes, Breast Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis, Gene Patenting, Mastectomy, Myriad Genetics, preventive mastectomy
so who owns your genes, Angelina?
Actress Angelina Jolie has made very public her personal and medical choice to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Untold millions now know about her family history of breast cancer that robbed her of her mother, young at 56, and the mutation of the BRCA1 gene that led her to choose preventive mastectomies. Doing so reduced her risk of developing breast cancer from 87%…
-
Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
seamus heaney & a dance for mother’s day
This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the…
-
Arizona, Artisans, Crafts, Fosterling, Lewis Hyde, Memoir, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Seamus Heaney, Writing
little marvels on mother’s day in america . . .
In a special for CNBC, Anna Andrianova shares the National Retail Federation’s estimate that $20.7 billion will be spent next Sunday, Mother’s Day in America. How easily that number rolls off the tongue – twenty-point-seven-billion-dollars – but what does it mean? A lot, of course. Years ago, I told my students to avoid using “a lot” in their compositions, because it was too…
