Sara finally decided to look at the photographs. She was immediately sorry. They made no sense. The first depicted a young dark-haired woman wearing an off-white antique-lace mantilla. On the back was written, “Sometimes the heart knows what the mind cannot comprehend.” It was her mother’s handwriting. Sara searched the hooded eyes in the photo.… Continue Reading
Curiosity and Identity
Curiosity that leads to looking for secrets lies at the crossroads of sameness and difference – desire to imagine we are all the same yet seduced by the possibility we are different. Imagining other ways of being offers the opportunity to disrupt the idea of us/them. What is outside is seldom the same as what… Continue Reading
The Tin Box
Everything had taken a turn, separating all that had been from what was yet to come. In one corner of the closet in Sara’s old bedroom, she found her mother’s memorabilia instead of hers. On the top shelf in what appeared to be a century of dust and cobwebs, an old tobacco tin nestled like… Continue Reading
Identity Formations in Who Can Know the Heart
In the Books and Writers group in which I participate, someone asked about ideas for characters. I wrote back that mine usually just seemed to appear on the page. That was mostly true, but the conversation caused me to remember that initially the inspiration for the primary characters in the current manuscript occurred years ago… Continue Reading
Who Can Know the Heart?
Sara thought the day her mother died had been the single worst of her life. But she was dead wrong. At the memorial service, she discovered she didn’t know her well, maybe not at all. Perhaps no one did. She’d always assumed her flaming red hair with temperament to match came from her Irish ancestors.… Continue Reading
Most of us live in the gray areas… (Between the Masks, 1998)
When developing a character, I mine the dark places in my psyche to shine a flashlight into unlit corners. For we are seldom simply who we are; we are who we think we are, who we tell others we are, who we tell ourselves we are, and more. Our identities seem to reside in the… Continue Reading
Undercurrents 
Recent Comments