Posts by DLufkin

Planning a family reunion this summer? Whether your group convenes at someone’s home, at a campsite in the Adirondacks or a dude ranch in Montana, a little planning will help ensure that far-flung friends and family member meet and greet, talk during the event, and remember the visit fondly long after it ends.  Why leave…

All my life I’ve enjoyed stringing words together and watching what appears on the page. While, initially, the writing process is solitary, at some point you bring in readers. Some authors do this early on: members of their writing groups read ten to fifteen pages every few weeks throughout the gestation period. Others, like me,…

Alternately winging and stalking around our local wildlife rehabilitation office, investigating the philodendron leaves, the computer keyboard, the top of the bookcase, a stray piece of paper, an electrical cord, a bit of red pepper… is a juvenile Corvus brachyrhynchos, American crow. Last spring, a nearby resident found this bird, then a nestling that had apparently fallen…

Each spring in Vermont I shuttle from garden center to garden center, buying plants to fill what appear to be holes in my garden. I fill pots and window boxes with Moo-Do and pile in as much color as possible. (Impatiens do the trick with, really, very little effort on my part.) Gerananium, angelonia, lavender……

I was asked recently what books influenced me in writing Little Island. It was a tough question to answer, in that every book I’ve ever read, beginning with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, has influenced me as a writer in some way. That said, my greatest influence for Little Island was not a book at all, but a weekend…

One of the characters in my new novel Little Island is an empty nester, her only son having just left for college. I am an empty nester now too, as I spent the summer feeding baby birds at the Vermont Institute for Natural Science. It was a life-changing experience. I’ve printed the beginning of the blog below. But a…

I like to teach memoir, because memoir bridges the space between fiction and non-fiction. I encourage students to employ tools of the fiction writer: character, setting, and plot. Fiction writers have three avenues from which to generate material: observation, imagination, and investigation. Memoirists have all these available as well. One difference, it is said, between…

Tote Bags ‘n’ Blogs: Katharine Britton: The Buttercup Principle: Where is the line between fiction and non-fiction?

I used to walk my dog along a mowed path through a field near my house. At the end of the field, a small wooden bridge led across a stream and connected that path to a trail on the other side. This trail cut through a glade and fed into another, larger field, used primarily…

For much of my life, I heard stories from my mother about her family and their house on Boston’s South Shore. One story, about the death of one of her three sisters, caught and held my attention. Not wanting simply to retell my mother’s story, I began to write a novel about two estranged sisters…