by Oskar Hokea I get connected via social media to all kinds of fascinating people. A few years ago I started following the blog of Oskar...

I just finished Mark Chesnut’s Prepare for Departure, a travel writer’s humorous, warm memoir of journeying with his mother to the end of...

Back in the day, long before my first novel publication (The Wind Thief), I craved to teach at the San Francisco Writers Conference. A...

A friend of mine, Jayne Martin, is a master of flash writing, which is the art of depicting an entire story from start to finish in 100...

Talk of war atrocities, scams and political shenanigans got you down? Have I got a podcast for you! Interesting Humans by Christain Ward...

Today is Mary Donahue’s birthday! That’s right, born April 13, 1963, Mary — the protagonist in Winter Light — turns 59 today. She’s...

My author friend, Annalisa Crawford, recently asked about the definition of “speculative memoirs.” I love such questions, because they...

CUSSING — OR NOT — MONDAY Do you think swearing is therapeutic? The question occurred to me when I was scrounging around for a Swahili...

When I was a kid, I loved reading Scott O’Dell’s 1960 Newbery Medal Award-winning novel Island of the Blue Dophins. Forever after, the...

When on the island of Kauai in Hawaii recently, we met surf guru Bill Hamilton. He grew up in the 1950s in southern LA, where some of the...

I knew my author photo was getting old, but loathed the idea of getting a new one. Though I’m somewhat photogenic for informal cell phone...

When my husband and I lived in Madison, WI, where he went to grad school, we started reading The Onion, a hilarious, free satirical...

All right, so the “must read” in this list featured on Bookglow — “all about books, all of the time” — is probably an exaggeration. But...

My friend recommended the movie, Soul Surfer based on the Kauai surfer girl who got her arm bitten off by a shark near the same area...

When researching for this trip to Kauai, I remembered from my previous trip that the island has a lot of non-native wild boar and...

What kind of traveler are you? My typical ratio is 20% planned activities that require reservations. The rest of the time is...

Before the pandemic, we used to go to Hawaii regularly. I'm happy to say I'm vaccinated, boostered, masked, and as such, leaving for...

I never tire of memoirs. I love learning about people and experiences that are vastly different than my own. That and there are so many...

Nature magazine has just published The best science images of 2021. Fantastic doesn’t begin to describe these photos! They’re...

There are so many books on the market, it’s hard to know what to read. That’s why I tend to look for lists that are curated. Judges take...