No doubt you’ve heard of the Great Ones—Lee and Grant, Montgomery and Rommel. We could add Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Duke of Wellington, and David the Giantkiller to the list as well. But how many unknown soldiers have you read about? During one of our furloughs, almost 20 years ago, my husband and…
What do a suitcase and an umbrella have in common? As we slogged through our years of homeschooling, my daughters and I occasionally lightened up the day with a storytelling game. We each scribbled some random words on slips of paper, stirred them a basket, and then withdrew two or three to start a story…
The first time my husband and I drove around the Cabot Trail in the Highlands of Cape Breton Island (Nova Scotia) might have been the last. At least, in my opinion at that inexperienced chapter in the story of my life. I hadn’t yet gotten used to long trips—a half-hour journey to Bangor from my…
Would you believe I searched my house high and low for two Anne of Green Gables tins I have? I acquired them some years ago on a foray to Prince Edward Island on the trail of Lucy Maud Montgomery, but failed to find even one for a photo this week. However, I did come up…
Do you remember Anne Shirley of Green Gables fame? If, like me, you’re a lifelong fan of the feisty redhead, you’ll also recall that she lived in a cottage called Patty’s Place during her college days and boarded at Windy Poplars while doing battle with the Pringles as a high school principal in Summerside, PEI….
On a recent road trip across the Andes and the Argentine pampas, we brought back several kilos of yerba mate, an herbal tea commonly served in most of the southern cone of South America. A few months ago, I promised another post about my collection of tea tins. Like the “tea rites” of mate, many…
Many authors keep in mind an avatar or ideal future reader while writing their books. Christian writing podcaster Thomas Umstattd, Jr. suggests directing our stories to a real person rather than an imaginary persona. The apostle Paul was writing for Timothy—one person—when he scribbled the biblical epistles of I and II Timothy. Yet millions of…
My husband’s a World War II buff, and I too value the rich legacy bequeathed by that generation of heroes. Sometimes I wonder how the stories and screens of the past century would have looked different had the dramatic and traumatic events of two world wars never happened. Certainly, both Hollywood filmmakers and New York…
How often do you not finish the books you’ve picked out and started with such diligent intentions? Though a friend tells me I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive that way, it happens more than I’d like to admit. Back when I homeschooled my girls, we learned one day that King Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199) owned a magnificent…
My two granddaughters were charmed by the quirky set of Russian dolls I put in their Christmas stockings when they visited Chile in December. Someday I’ll share with them the stories inside the story here. As did—surprisingly—a recent guest speaker at our church when he used a set of these dolls as an object lesson….
“Voice,” in literary terms, refers to the attitude or personality of the author, narrator, or point-of-view character in a piece of writing. Voice shows up in both fiction and nonfiction. It can be comical, cozy, sophisticated, simple, intellectual, down-to-earth, edgy, monotonous, etc. But what if I lost my voice? I already know what that’s like…
Everything’s built up. That’s what we noticed most as we left the palafito (cottage-on-stilts) where we’d lodged in Castro and headed for the village of Rilán. The landscape of the Chiloé Islands features many examples of architectural creativity, but today the road was lined with building projects. For starters, we could have arrived at the…