Books & Writing
My Book Proposal Wins Hazel Rowley Prize
I’m grateful to the International Biographers Organization (BIO) for giving me its 2017 Hazel Rowley Prize. I received the award, for the best proposal for a first biography, on May 20 at BIO’s conference in Boston. BIO began around the time I started my book project. The group has been a terrific resource, especially to a…
Read More‘Railway Man’ a Contrast to Scidmore POW Book
My husband and I recently watched “The Railway Man,” starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman. It’s emotionally powerful, and interesting as well in light of my biography of Eliza Scidmore. Her last book was As the Hague Ordains. Written as a thinly disguised novel, it looked at POW conditions in Japan in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese…
Read MoreLibriVox Adds Scidmore Writing on Alaska
Eliza Scidmore has made her debut on LibriVox, the free online service of audio books in the public domain. LibriVox has started adding back volumes of National Geographic, some containing articles by Scidmore. I discovered LibriVox a couple of years ago and am now a big fan. The selections consist of only older works —…
Read More‘Pen Pal’ in Japan Aids My Book Research
This is Ichiro Fudai. We’ve never met. But he and I have corresponded online for many weeks, after he learned about my book project on Eliza Scidmore through a TV program that aired during my research trip to Japan in 2013. Ichiro, who has visited the United States and has an excellent command of English,…
Read MoreRobert Caro Stresses ‘Sense of Place’ in Biography
There’s no greater master of biography writing today than Robert Caro. I recall being mightily impressed with his keynote speech at the 2011 conference of Biographers International Organization (BIO). So I’m grateful to Steve Weinberg, a journalist and biographer (and one of my former journalism profs at the University of Missouri), for flagging this article…
Read MoreIn Boston, Biographers and a Special Letter
Anyone writing life stories has a great resource in Biographers International Organization. The group began five years ago through the efforts of prize-winning author James McGrath Morris and others to provide collegiality and support in the often-long slog of writing biography. I’ve attended three of BIO’s annual conferences. They seem to get better every year,…
Read MoreShut Out From the Library of Congress
Bruce and I are now a 100-percent furloughed household. He’s in a “non-essential” federal job and thus on unofficial R&R. And here’s what the government shutdown looks like from my little spot in the universe. It’s my tiny “study desk” room at the Library of Congress, on the fifth floor of the Adams Building. I’ve…
Read MoreA Retreat in Santa Fe for Scidmore Book
Time was my Valentine this year. Long blocks of uninterrupted time. I’m just back from three blissful weeks of solitude and seclusion in a cozy casita in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, where I worked on my book about Eliza Scidmore. Amid the desolation of winter in the East, I came home…
Read MoreMayborn Conference Gives Me Biography Fellowship
Last month at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine, Texas, I received the organization’s annual fellowship in biography. The award provides an “emerging biographer” with writing time during a short-term residency in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, north of Santa Fe, N.M. I’ll be working on my biography of Eliza Scidmore.…
Read MoreReading at ‘New Mercury’ Series in Baltimore
Last Saturday night I read, along with three other nonfiction writers, at the Windup Space in Baltimore as part of the monthly New Mercury Readings series. Many thanks to Deborah Rudacille and John Barry for inviting me. I read from my book in progress on Eliza Scidmore, describing some scenes from her 1883 journey aboard…
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