Faith, Fiction, Friends

It showed up as a Facebook memory, a story I hadn’t thought about in years. I’d posted in August of 2009 on my blog and linked it from Faceb...

When I began to write my historical novel  Brookhaven , my jumping off point was a family story. My father often told me about my great-gran...

My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provide...

I employed the poetry of  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow  (1807-1882) as a kind of refrain in my novel  Brookhaven . A main character is well kn...

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on my incredibly short, and incredibly long, eight months with St. Louis Public Schools. What began with t...

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of t...

If I had any doubts  from the job interview , the  first day on the job was confirmation .  The next few months underscored it . If I could ...

I was on a multi-day business trip to Washington, D.C. I had a free afternoon, so I walked from the hotel to the National Gallery on the Mal...

If I had a mental image of John Adams, it was of a rather dour individual who bridged the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jeffe...

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I l...

Luke Adam Hawker is a designer who made the leap to full-time art in 2015. His background is architecture and design, and in his art, he wor...

For a very long time, no one in my father’s family – father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins – knew why the family Bible contained a ...

Yesterday, I received  I Gave You My Silence , the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner  Mario Vargas Llosa . Vargas Llosa died last year; this is...

I’m trying to remember when I first became interested in Russian history. Most likely, when I was 10, and one of my Christmas presents (my m...

DI Gareth Benedict and his team are assigned to help police the  Island Games , a sports event held every two years and attracting teams in ...

The name  John Fremont  (1813-1890) evokes images of  Manifest Destiny , exploration of the western United States, the first Republican cand...

Hisham Matar won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for  The Return , the story of his search for his father, who’d been kidnapped and presuma...

In late October, we were back at the St. Louis County Library. We had previously attended  the talk by mystery writer Elizabeth George ; thi...

It was only coincidental. I read  Joseph Luzzi’s   In a Dark Wood: A Memoir  (2015) and the next in my reading pile was  Unconditional: A No...

It helped to have heard Elizabeth George  speak in early October at the St. Louis County Library . She was doing a promotional tour for her ...