Today, Columbus Day is being celebrated in Spain—the colonization of the Americas. The lost Spanish empire. Why is Christopher Columbus, one individual, famous for this? What differentiated Columbus from other explorers who came to the Americas?
My nephew, James Camali, is finishing up his movie. It’s called The Mental State. It’s about a teenage boy in the rural South who manifests signs of mental illness and can’t get any help. His mother tries at the school, at the church, with psychologists, and there is n...
“We are all African!” said a blond-haired blue-eyed professor named Spencer Wells, a geneticist and anthropologist. He had been working on tracing DNA for National Geographic to document genetic diversity throughout the world. The film that was produced after d...
I just finished reading The Raven's Children by Yulia Yakovleva and I found many reasons to recommend this book to both young people and adults. Set in Soviet Leningrad, the main character’s parents and little brother get taken away to a gulag and he is confused by thi...
My sister Monika died yesterday in Germany. She was 75, the child of my father during his imprisonment in World War II. I only found out about her when I was already in my 40s and she in her 50s (more than ten years after my father's death). She was, unfort...
Sometimes I fall asleep with my cat’s head under my chin. It is his idea. For some reason he likes that.
He likes it when I am lying on my left side and he too can get his little head on the pillow alongside me. Yes, he still loves curling up into a complete circle, a f...
A few friends have asked me for book recommendations. I can strongly recommend these books from last year’s reading. I enjoyed them a lot. I also included my own book, Pink Flamingos, which I finished translating last summer. Happy reading!
My friend Lena and I are going through the most wonderful and incredible process of editing the Russian version of my book that is being translated in Moscow by Ilya Davydov. Just want to underline what a great translator Ilya is, how confident I am in his work, and ho...
What do I do about stories I wish I had included--maybe do a second book?
So much has changed over the years. Just think of how the computer has affected us. I can backspace and delete with no problem. Yet I remember agonizing over papers where I had to white things out...
