This month, I’m talking about art again. Actually, a book about art, The Mirror and the Palette, by Jennifer Higgie, where she covers five hundred years of women’s self-portraiture, a genre women have long practiced, even if mostly under the radar.
This month, I’m talking about art again. Actually, a book about art, The Mirror and the Palette, by Jennifer Higgie, where she covers five hundred years of women’s self-portraiture, a genre women have long practiced, even if mostly under the radar.
What would Titian do? With six of his paintings now on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a bruhaha has arisen about how they should be presented to a contemporary audience. This leads me to wonder what Titian would do if he were among us today.
In last month’s newsletter, I ruminated on how women can move history. Now I’m back with more on the subject, specifically Phebe Lord Upham, born in Maine in 1804.
Two years ago I was invited to give a reading in New York. My husband Andrew came with me and, naturally, we added museums and restaurants to the trip. One evening we went to Prune, a wonderful place on East 1st Street (now regrettably closed) run by chef Gabrielle Hamilton and her wife.
This month’s newsletter is about covers and newsletters. That sounds circular, to have a newsletter about a newsletter, but bear with me. First, though, let’s talk about covers. I’m a sucker for a good book cover. Probably you are too. It beckons and promises to transport you to another world. Everything about it – abstract […]
Vaccines are all the buzz these days. Saturated with news coverage, we’ve absorbed new terms like spike protein and messenger RNA, and learned that some vaccines, like Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, are really a new breed. Without recent advances in biotechnology, we wouldn’t have these vaccines at all. Did you know that the polio vaccine, which […]
Susan Smith was born in 1847 into a farming family that raised pork in Weeksville, a section of Brooklyn, New York sandwiched between Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and Crown Heights. Her nine siblings became school teachers and principals, but she went into medicine, graduating as valedictorian from New York Medical College for Women in 1870. When she […]
I first saw these women at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. The obvious whimsy of the picture appealed to me, but I found myself thinking about it long after I had left the museum. Did that mean there was some deeper meaning for me and my work? Ida Crie took the photograph. She […]
For my friends, I have news. I am about to submit my book manuscript to the publisher and I’ll be taking a breather. There’s still more work ahead (a cover design to approve, copyediting, more rounds of proofreading), but because the book won’t be out until the spring of 2022, I want to use this […]