Ten years ago this summer, I took my first-ever writing class from Kathi Appelt at Rice University. It was early on in my husband’s year-long surgery fellowship, and we’d just arrived in Houston. The heat was unbearable, the people were outrageously polite (“Hello, ma’am”s everywhere!), and Kathi was fascinatingly interesting, as were all the attendees–some […]
Evolution and Charles Darwin
Dan and I and little L. have recently flown to a faraway tropical island. On the plane I tried to catch up on my Speaking of Faith podcasts. One in particular, that I’d been eager to listen to, was “Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin.” You’d think that since my training was in the biological […]
Creative Genius
Have you heard of the TED Conferences? The following is taken from their website, as way of introduction: “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s […]
Despair in The Sparrow
I’ve just finished The Sparrow, and I’m a little unnerved by it, to say the least. The despair is so tangible, so grossly real, that I myself have all the same questions the hopeless Emilio expresses in the end. And because I don’t want to ruin the awful ending for any of you who decide […]
Marriage
Dan and I will have been married 18 years in June, and I’m sure Dan would agree with me, as I with him, that we are not the same two people who exchanged wedding vows on that warm summer evening in 1991. The importance of that statement (not being the same people) cannot be explained […]