To say that World War I was gruesome is to understate the obvious. Updated weapons—like the 600-bullets-per-minute, rapid-fire machine gun, with a range of more than 1,000 yards—decimated infantries. Chlorine gas, phosgene, and mustard gas maimed more than killed, but caused devastating lung and skin damage. Hellish flame throwers terrorized troops. Deadly ordinance destroyed armies […]
Wordsong
When I write, I hear music. In the words, that is. Some writers play favorite music in the background while writing. I don’t. It distracts me from hearing melodies as they emerge from the page. I can trace my awareness of word rhythms to the beginning of my professional writing career decades ago, in public […]
In the Query Trenches
I’ve been sending out queries for Line of Flight since November, about 10 months, now. So much for any naive assumptions that I’d find a literary agent sooner than later. I’m up to about 40 queries, so far, and have received a variety of form letter rejections and a couple of more personal notes, as […]
Time Travel
This afternoon at 2:15, my husband and I were supposed to be on a plane taxiing from the gate on a long-planned trip abroad—our first significant excursion in three years. I had been dreaming of our destination even before the pandemic hit. Having waited patiently, venturing only as far as a day’s drive from home […]
Letters from a French Hospital
In October 1914, two-and-a-half months after Germany launched WWI in Europe, Dr. Mary M. Crawford, a graduate of Cornell University (’04) and Cornell Medical College (’07), set sail for France—one of six American surgeons journeying to Paris to assist in medical treatment of combatants at the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. In Line of Flight, […]
In Their Words
For anything I’ve ever written, be it fiction or non-fiction, my favorite research is always sifting through primary sources. There is something about reading materials that are unfiltered by someone else’s editorial judgment, in their original form, that gives me chills, as if I’m connecting across time and space to another person’s soul. My research […]