Ballard is a Seattle neighborhood.  A former student of mine has a riff where she describes the two faces of Ballard:  There’s the old Scandinavian community, the fishing boats, brick houses, and the Nordic Heritage Museum.  And the new Ballard that sits at Cupcake Royale with their Macs, looking important and saying, “I am so  Read the Rest…

In Olivia Manning’s wonderful Balkan Trilogy set in World War II Bucharest, Guy Pringle, most lovable of extroverts, decides to do an amateur production of Shakespeare. He chooses Troilus and Cressida.  It’s so accessible to the ex-pats and legation folks that I think, well, how hard a play could it be? So here I am  Read the Rest…

I was three pages into Harold Bloom’s celebrated masterpiece, Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human, and Twelfth Night sounded like the dullest play ever written. So I did myself a favor: I put Harold Bloom on the shelf for my annual yard sale.  Then I plowed through the text of Twelfth Night once so I  Read the Rest…

I’m not sure I even realized that Shakespeare wrote a play called Henry V let alone that I would like it.  Harold Bloom (my stuffy discussant) had very little to say about it other than Falstaff isn’t in it.  He seems to judge every character by Falstaff or Hamlet.  I get it: they’re transcendent characters.   Read the Rest…

In which I begin to cobble together what literary flotsam I do possess and attempt to read the entire works of William Shakespeare. It’s summer.  People are talking about their summer reading lists.  Here’s what happened to me: I loved Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve.( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/05/swerving-and-centering/) It  led me to dust off his Will in  Read the Rest…

Here in Seattle we have had a week of lovely early summer weather.   It was warm enough to sit under my magnificent 40 year old lilac trees at six in the morning, drink tea and read.  I was so engrossed in the book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Swerve that I read it straight through,  Read the Rest…

The subject is women’s bodies.  I had a moment the other day that would have been welcome 45 years ago, and I have been thinking about it ever since.  The prep work for the moment began as I was reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants which was as funny and lively as I expected it to  Read the Rest…

My book came out last Thursday on the full moon in Taurus, an auspicious day.   Taurean energy is both creative and possessive and my book, two and a half years in the writing, is all about me.   A memoir is not history.  I didn’t pretend to set out facts.  I wrote as I remembered but  Read the Rest…

I was hoping I could come up with something more interesting, certainly more laudatory, than today’s topic but since I haven’t: I yelled at the sopranos the other night.  I was appalled.  I am not in the habit of yelling at my singers.  But after having succumbed to the impulse, what came out of me  Read the Rest…

Waiting.  I’ve never been good at it.   When I was a girl and Halloween fell on a school night, the school day lasted a week, no, a year.  Waiting for this book to be published is like waiting for that moment when I would step out the door in my gypsy costume (scarf tied backward  Read the Rest…