My wife, a cancer physician, recently asked me where a story for a novelist begins. As a scientist and as a very close and insightful reader of my novels, she was articulating a question that many non-writers and beginning writers have about the creative process; namely, where does a novel start? I’m not a scientist, nor am I someone who…
How does a parent survive the death of a child? Losing a child suggests that the world has been turned topsy-turvy, upside-down. Parents are supposed to die before their children. That’s the natural order of things. So how does one survive that most unnatural and unimaginable events? That’s the problem I posed for my main character, Elizabeth, in Resting Places.…
Recently, I visited the Clark art museum in Williamstown. I happened upon Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s moving sculpture, Mater Dolorosa. Unlike so many works of art about Mary’s grief over the death of her son, this one depicts only the woman’s bust, alone, in terrible anguish. The story about the sculpture was even more moving. In a park, the artist Carpeaux had…
Highway Signs