Blog Posts

Plastic bin neatly stacked with colored notebooks

Read of the week: Note-taking

By Kate Blackwood / July 10, 2021

This post by magazine writer Ben Mauk has renewed my appetite for taking note of the world. And encouraged me to buy a new notebook.

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Two people sit at a table with a rose centerpiece

Mother stories

By Kate Blackwood / May 9, 2021

As I celebrate Mother’s Day this year with a visit from my own amazing mom, I’m thinking of mother characters who play central – and complicated – roles in novels I’ve read this year.

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beach beside a river, fog

What I didn’t expect from a place I’ve never been: Action in “Mendocino Fire”

By Kate Blackwood / March 6, 2021

The way she tells it, it’s happening before you know it’s happening, much the same way the character is plunged into the sea or down a steep drop or into the vortex of an irrevocable relational tangle. The prose is swift and unexpectedly physical.

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Several open books in a pile

Novel beginnings and beginning novels with Dana Spiotta

By Kate Blackwood / February 27, 2021

Those first words set the tone, voice, place, language, and objective of the novel. Like the set of instructions that comes with a game, they teach the reader how to “play the game” of this world.

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