Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.