A few years back, my husband and I went to a Boston Ballet performance of The Nutcracker. Behind us sat a mother and her five-year-old son, who was deeply psyched to be there, wriggling and fidgeting with glee. As soon…
Louie Cronin’s debut novel, Everyone Loves You Back, is a coming-of-middle-age novel that explores the comedy and tragedy that occur when competing economic classes collide in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her manuscript won the 2015 Molly Ivors Fiction Prize from Gorsky Press…
The other day I was talking to my partner, Todd, as we commuted on the MBTA (red line represent!) He asked how many books I’d written. I began the sophisticated process of counting on my hands. Nine. I’ve written (not…
Dear Ms. J., We’ve never met each other, but several years ago you took the time to send me a handwritten note regarding my story, Every Bird Casts a Shadow, after I submitted it to The Sun. You were kind…
“The setting is like a character.” It’s a strange phrase, when you think about it, but it’s one I hear increasingly often in workshop. And so lately I’ve been wondering what people really mean by this, for setting to be “like…
Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say. No problem. Easy enough to hang onto the definition: To be compassionate is to both understand and…