Blog

The Emigrant/Immigrant Experience: On hardships, bravery, and chutzpah By Laura Anne Bird “I've been thinking about some version of this novel since I was a little girl,” Juliet Grames says about her riveting debut, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. “When I was five, my grandmother had a traumatic brain injury that made me obsessed with the idea of capturing and preserving her life story. What I knew about her upbringing in impoverished southern Italy in the 1920s as well as her emigration to the U.S. fascinated me.” Grames spent years collecting stories from her extended family in [...]

Christina Clancy The Sandwich Generation and Families of Choice By Laura Anne Bird In Christina Clancy’s debut novel, The Second Home, a charming little beach house in Cape Cod assumes an enormous role: it serves as a magnet—both geographical and emotional—that tugs relentlessly on the three adult Gordon children. "Houses are containers of memories,” says Clancy. “The spaces and the objects inside of them have lives.” Indeed, the Gordons’ Wellfleet, Massachusetts home has been in the family for generations, which means that every creaky floorboard, scruffy chair, and mote of dust has the power to stir up nostalgia [...]

Lisl Detlefsen’s Five Book Recommendations for AGvocates of All Ages By Laura Anne Bird How many authors do you know who live on a cranberry farm? I have one answer for you: Lisl Detlefsen. This writer of six children’s books is based in Cranmoor, Wisconsin on 1400 acres of rural land, 140 of which are dedicated to the cranberries themselves. (Detlefsen beautifully describes the booming, corralling, cleaning, and eating of this dark-red fruit in her aptly named Time for Cranberries.) While earning her degree in art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Detlefsen envisioned moving to a big city, but when she [...]