i gave this interview for motherhood later.
there's a lot more to say about being a stepmom. i focused on cordelia, but i also have a stepson i love from another marriage.
you didn't know about my complicated past, did you?
please go here for tickets to the off broadway play motherhood out loud.
tiny little frog in the garden
smaller than a rose petal.
joy in the garden:
white roses, blue lobelia,
agapanthus, alyssum.
hummingbirds, phoebes,
gnatcatchers.
hiding cat.
beyond the borders of my yard--
a creek, the sea,
a hillside where raptors hunt.
everywhere, no matter where i look,
the sky.
[if you love to garden, will you consider reading about ways organic gardening can benefit the environment and your health?]
the month of september
has inspired a lot of music;
here's one song i really love:
by rosanne cash (featuring johnny cash)
rosanne sang it with her father, then sang it at his memorial.
the lyrics really touch me, and the music is beautiful.
i'm practicing it on my guitar for a very select audience.
it is possible,
i mean definite,
that there is nothing
better for the heart
than a beach walk.
en cuerpo y alma...
two cats sit inside the screen door, watching and vigilant as white roses rustle in the breeze, waiting for who-knows-what to happen. they live in a constant state of anticipation, except, of course, when it exhausts them and they are forced, as happens with cats, to nap.
summer lasts another week, but fall migration is underway. new warblers heading south, are posted to nyc e-birds every day, and there's much excitement about a lark sparrow in the north end. autumn is my favorite season.
i've been sad lately, and i thank you for your kindness and comments. the tendency is to say i'm fine now, all is well, i'm going to be happy from now on. i think many of us do that, try to hurry unwished-for emotions along, reassure everyone that things are fine fine fine. the truth is happiness and sadness ebb and flow, they're the tide of life.
grief echoes love in the deepest way. to be able to feel that kind of love makes me think of the velveteen rabbit, what it means to be real. what it means to be human. still, and all, there is beauty in everything, even grief. in the words of a very wise young woman: "when life hands you a lemon tree, make lemonade." 
the crescent moon
cut deep this month. she died the day
the waxing crescent swung low
through the cedars.
i must have grieved through the half moon
i don't remember.
mourning erases memory, sweeps it into clouds.
she lives in my dreams
or whenever my eyes are closed.
tonight the moon is full
let it bring her back to me.
every new thing i see without her
a milestone beyond bearing.
september full moon
bring her back to me.
white ghost face
hunting my yard at night.
morning, a pellet of bones, fur, tiny skull:
right in my path, all that was left.
no pesticides=food for owls
blue sky. the morning of september 11, 2001 i met my editor tracy devine and bantam deputy publisher nita taublib for breakfast at charlotte, just across the street from the random house offices. it was one of our many wonderful meetings, talking about books and life--a colleague of ours had just gotten married, and we were catching up on that when we heard a plane had hit one of the world trade towers.
a small plane i thought, it had to be, but how terrible no matter the size, how shocking. but it wasn't a small plane, and then the second jet hit, and nita and tracy and i hugged goodbye and hurried away into our lives to plan and make sense or no-sense and be in new york city--all three of us lived there--that had already changed forever, only we just didn't know it yet.
impressions: the blue sky everyone still talks about; plume of smoke visible from midtown, constant sirens, walking downtown and seeing people on cell phones--i didn't have one yet. an hour later, after the towers fell, seeing people in business suits covered with ash. the next nights: below 14th street, a dust cloud that glowed red after dark, as thick as the foggiest london night. the posters hung by families, their missing loved ones, on the wall by famous ray's pizza across from st. vincent's hospital. going to the cathedral of st. john the divine, didn't matter what religion you were or were not, just a place to gather and pray and mourn.
the city smelled of smoke and ghosts. people were kind to each other but also lost it on a frequent basis. i remember those early days, tuning into local tv news, pre-theme music. do you know what i mean? the moment when a tragedy acquires a combination of familiarity and production values, and the tv producers give it solemn theme music and a name. it takes away the raw. i hated when that happened a day or two after 9/11.
heading to the west side highway many nights--closed to traffic, it was kept open for search and rescue workers. people lined the streets, watching pickup trucks, fire trucks, many with out of state plates, drive south toward the world trade center. i was in the midst of leaving a worse than bad marriage, but the tragedy bound us together for a few more months, and those first nights after the towers collapsed we'd go to the west side highway, watch those rescue trucks in the surreal riverside light. i couldn't bear for anything else to collapse.
during the early days after the attack, friends helped at the site. the poet-nun sister leslie went to st. paul's with other sisters from her community, to offer spiritual comfort to the rescue workers. poet-naturalist e.j. mcadams, then an urban park ranger, spent days in and around the rubble, going into apartments to rescue animals abandoned in the evacuation. interesting that my two closest poet friends had reason to be there--the city needed poets more than ever.
the week after the towers fell i stood on park avenue south and watched a woman in a yellow dress commit suicide, jumping from a ledge and landing at my feet. the grief in the city was unimaginable. had she lost someone in the towers? or was the city's collective sorrow just too much to bear?
in december my friend, poet, writer, and radio personality colin mcenroe came to the city from hartford and he is a sensitive soul as we all know so we went downtown but mostly we went to the cathedral to watch paul winter prepare for his solstice concert and a few days later there was a fire in the cathedral and everything seemed touched by sorrow, mystical beauty, blue stained glass, and the unpredictability of life.
ten years have passed. the anniversary unbearable at first, but time dulls, if not heals, the shock and pain. for years the cats and i have looked out my south-facing chelsea windows to see the towers of light rising up from where the twin towers once stood. they appear beautiful, mystical, but i love nature, and i couldn't and can't deny that they're magnets to birds that fly by night, fall migrants heading south for the winter--the birds get trapped in the light columns, and at dawn fall to the ground. after a while i couldn't stand seeing those light towers--they reminded me of death, not hope. so i stopped looking out my window the last years of this decade of september 11's.
i'm not in ny this year. i want to be far away, and i am. the sky is blue, the way it was that day. there are no speeches or memorials or flags. there are no columns of light. but there is peace and prayer and memory, and there are poems, and there is love. nita and tracy, we were together that morning. i'm holding your hands, wherever you are.
bright eyes
turquoise
the color of light
and river stones
you saw everything
inside me
who else could do that?
two cedars
crescent moon
sleep, my girl.
Summer was the closest we came to pure joy when we were young. Freedom from school, being set loose on the beach, with adventures so plentiful we didn’t even have to go looking for them. We had a group of close “summer friends” who we’d see every year from June till September, and we’d be together from first light till we were too exhausted to do anymore.
Read MoreBelow is an excerpt of a Q & A I had recently. Question: You made your writing debut in 1985 with ANGELS ALL OVER TOWN. THE SILVER BOAT is your twenty-ninth novel. How --- if at all --- has your writing process changed over time? Have the Internet and other technological advances affected your writing experience?
Luanne Rice: In many ways my process has changed very little. My novels always begin with a character. I wait for her to tell me who she is; often she inhabits my dreams. Once I know her name, I'm ready to start writing. Although I now work on a MacBookPro 15, I still like to write the earliest scenes on a yellow legal pad with a fountain pen. The Internet makes research go faster, but something is lost. It's too easy to search for information, take what I need, and move on. I prefer to do research from books, getting lost in the background and immersed in the realm of whatever I'm trying to learn.
Q: The importance of family is a recurring theme in your novels. How did your own upbringing influence your decision to become a writer?
LR: My family was loving but complicated. Our house was filled with secrets and bass notes. As a child I was a detective, listening at walls and going through drawers, looking for answers to what was wrong. My writing has been my lifelong solution to figuring things out, finding the love I know was there, learning everything I can about the way families work, ways of loving and trying to be happy.
Q: "Was that the inspiration for Dulse's latest adventure? Dar wasn't sure. She only knew that her ideas came from deep down, experiences and emotions of her own" (p. 282). Part of what makes your novels so heartfelt is that each of them comes from a deeply personal place. What was your inspiration for THE SILVER BOAT?
LR: The answer has three parts:
a) Like the McCarthy sisters, my sisters and I had to face what to do with our beloved family beach cottage after our mother died. It was an immense challenge. The house contained so many ghosts and memories. My grandparents had built it; no other family had ever occupied it. It sits on a granite hill, and the top step still has three pennies placed there by my grandfather in 1938, the year it was built. We put it on the market for ten seconds --- selling felt unthinkable. My sisters were very generous and let me buy them out. I still want it to be the family house.
b) My father had a way of disappearing. Not forever, like Michael McCarthy, but frequently, and without explanation. I've been writing my way into that situation my whole life.
c) The silver boat actually exists.
Below is an excerpt from a recent article in Martha's Vineyard Magazine. One foggy July day at Lucy Vincent Beach, my four baby-sitting charges and I built a sand castle. It was my first summer on the Island. Salty chill, clay bluff curving above, black rocks jutting up, echo of a distant bell buoy – it was a deliciously moody day. Sifting for pebbles and bits of quahaug shell to decorate our drawbridge sent me dreaming.
Nearby, a young man surfed out of the fog. He walked over and crouched down to drizzle sand turrets onto our castle, then disappeared back into the pea soup without saying a word. Out of these elements, a short story was born – and my first brush with the Island’s creative muse. I was fourteen.
Rhiannon Ally and Kevin Roberts talk to Luanne about The Silver Boat.
Adam interviews Luanne for the Big App Show about The Silver Boat
Luanne talks about The Silver Boat on the Pix 11 Morning Show.
"do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? i always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." ~daisy buchanan in "the great gatsby" by f. scott fitzgerald.
one of my favorite novels, favorite characters, favorite quotes. i think i mention it every year at this time, don't i?
tomorrow, june 21, is the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. i'll watch for it and hope i don't miss it. (i don't think i will...) if my parents were still alive, it would have been their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. they were married in old lyme, ct, where they, and my grandparents, and my sisters and i, and friends and cats and i have watched so many longest days of the year.
we'll celebrate my parents, and summer...and reread gatsby and think of the green light at the end of daisy's dock.
happy summer--and happy summer reading--to all!
(i love the painting above--"summer night" by winslow homer, at the musee d'orsay in paris.)
box full of poem scraps, ideas, ideas,
songs in
a minor key.
moleskine diaries,
thank you
harrison, kooser,
thank you
hemingway,
thank you.
does every writer
try? or why
limit it to writers?
a good bonfire
might help.
lines about the theater
and mosquitos.
moving the box
means moving the creek.
from the mesa
you can see water
at the base
of the canyon.
(written in new york city during a thunderstorm, 17 june 11)
my friend in new hampshire has a field of lupines. my friend in vermont feels like wilted petunias and invited me to have lemonade on her porch.
my sister in mystic is doing yard work, and i want to bring her herbs from mim's garden--rosemary, sage, and mint with roots that go down deep and go back forever. oh wait, she already has herbs from mim's garden.
in chelsea my little terrace has weeds between the stones and a hawk who perches on the rail eyeing pigeons.
maggie sits inside and watches the hawk.