December 31, 2008

It's New Year's

And a bright sunny day in Chicago.  Cold, but nothing like the -2 F we had a week ago, so we’re happy.  About half a mile from my home, in between us and Lake Michigan, is a small wilderness called “Wooded Isle.”  It’s a bird sanctuary, and it holds a Japanese Garden, a gift of […]

December 21, 2008

South Chicago

The map that I’ve put at the top of the blog is a slice of a stylized drawing of South Chicago, the neighborhood where V I Warshawski grew up.  I’ve given her a fictitious high school, but Bowen High is where she would have gone.  The Skyway, the elevated highway that cuts the neighborhood in […]

December 20, 2008

Writing Late at night

I was imagining a V I kind of story and started it here on the blog, Alchemy, Chapter One–but I didn’t explain that it was a kind of story, or maybe I should say a Beta story. More will take place from time to time, always with the heading of “Alchemy”

December 7, 2008

Hardball: the return of V I

This is the title of a new novel about V I which I finished writing a few weeks ago. My publisher likes it, so it’s a go. They haven’t given me a pub date yet, but look for it this coming fall, unless the publishing industry disappears completely. The book takes place in the present, […]

November 19, 2008

Jumping off the High Board

My favorite cousin has been visiting me and just took off, which leaves me melancholy.  She’s an amazing woman: she’s a skilled trekker and wilderness guide, she’s a feminist who started two small women’s presses.  The second,  Aunt Lute Books, survives to this day.  She ran the oldest women’s bookstore in America, Amazon Books, (no connection […]

November 12, 2008

What should Barack read?

On November 1, the Chicago Tribune invited its two heavy-hitter writers, Aleksander Hemon, and Garry Wills, to come up with a list of required reading for the new president: five fiction, five non-fiction. You can see therelist here: It includes Thucydides, Al Gore, and Jose Saramago, among others. I have to confess, I was underimpressed […]

November 5, 2008

I can't believe I lived to see the day

From eleven o’clock last night until noon today, November 4, I’ve been getting calls from friends and relations around the world, calling back, hearing the joy, feeling the relief.  I didn’t go to Grant Park–I’d been working for the campaign in Indiana earlier in the day, and didn’t have the stamina for standing in crowds. […]

November 1, 2008

Studs Terkel, Rest in Action

Studs Terkel died yesterday. Studs was one of the country’s great journalists, in print and on radio, a gifted listener, a commanding raconteur, the ultimate “voice of the voiceless.” He was born in New York, but Chicago was his home for the great span of his adult life. He had a restless curiosity for the […]

October 28, 2008

welcome to my world

Why I Support Barack Obama by Sara Paretsky   I grew up in rural Kansas, with the kind of Norman Rockwell, regular-gal childhood you hear a lot about these days: our two-room school’s baseball diamond was carved from a cornfield.  My dad, who held Army medals for marksmanship, owned two rifles.  I never killed a […]

August 11, 2008

Fire Sale, Rescued!