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 […]
On Creating a Voice
Of the many lessons learned over seven years of writing Line of Flight, one of the most challenging was figuring out the voice of my narrator, Simone Levitsky. I knew in my gut that I needed to tell the story from her point of view, and I wrote early drafts as her journal. It was […]
In the Trenches
You can travel the world on the internet, but you can only go so far. About nine months into writing the first draft of my WWI novel, including a 20,000-word false start, I realized that I needed to see and feel the landscapes that existed only in my imagination. Books and online research were my […]
Eighteen Minutes
Chances are, you’ve heard of the Titanic. On April 15, 1912, the great British transatlantic steamer struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. More than 1,500 souls lost their lives in that calamity, which has been memorialized in popular culture ever since. There are books, […]
A Pigeon Waddles into a Scene
One of my favorite pieces of writing advice comes from Ann Lamott in Bird by Bird. First drafts are incredibly hard to write and often lousy. She is more blunt: For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at […]