Blog

Want a good writerly side job? You’re going to eat anyway. You’re going to write anyway. Get paid to do both! In the early 1990s, my wife showed me an advertisement in the largest newspaper in Maine. The newspaper was searching for a new anonymous restaurant critic, the old one having lasted just a short time. About five years later, having published 258 restaurant reviews and eaten 790 professional meals, I could understand why the previous critic dropped out. It’s no p

Original post can be found on Outdoors Inspired by John Baranowski. I enjoy talking to hikers along the trail. Most hikers whether day,...

I didn’t know why I wrote the novel Paradise until I had gained what I did gain on its last day of writing. Then I knew. My long...

When I wrote my latest novel, A Haunting on Dunbar Lane , I was enjoying life on the sunny coast of Florida, where we feast on grilled...

My husband Joe and I have lived in Virginia for more than thirty-four years. We were both born and raised in Iowa, but after our wedding...

After two years of going nowhere fast, due to COVID-19, my husband and I booked international flights and worked with a tour consultant...

The plane lifted off from Anchorage, Alaska, on a stunningly beautiful May morning for an unusually placid flight to St Paul Island, 750...

Maine! That crinkled shoreline. Suppose you are a seagull. You decide to fly from the southern end of Maine’s coastline where it meets...

I was twelve. I had ridden my blue bike with multi-colored plastic handle bar streamers to the Woolworth Store to buy my favorite...

Are you, like me, a devotee of World War II history? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you are, and one day, out of the blue, you...

Tired of shielding my face in a scarf from chilling wind gusts that a typical New England winter day brought, my husband and I decided to...

Cape May Island Cape May is a city at the southern tip of Cape May Peninsula in New Jersey where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic...

Martha's Vineyard is one of my favorite places to visit for so many reasons. There are no chain stores, hotels, fast-food restaurants,...

It was time for my yearly review. I was nervous, as usual. No, I wasn’t at work. I wasn’t an adult. I was “just” a teenaged girl in a...

To a non-writer, it might seem that writing a memoir is easy. You know what happened—just tell the truth. Here’s a passage from a good...

Ocracoke Island offers a respite for travelers eager to pull up anchor and leave the concerns of the mainland. Our family has been...

Note from Michelle: One of my favorite historical fiction trilogies is the Antonius Trilogy by Brook Allen, a Virginia author. Brook did...

Whispers from the Past Led Me to My Future I never imagined that losing a family recipe would change my life’s course. It sounds silly,...