Books, Chocolate, Sundries.

Today is the first official day of fall, but here in Austin it’s midsummer. The temperatures are still in the 80s and 90s…and I love it. In New York summer always felt too short, and I’m glad that summer here will stretch into…October? November? I guess I’ll soon find out. One of my favorite poems [...]

I’ve become addicted to checking three election poll sites: Pollster, RealClearPolitics, and FiveThirtyEight. I’m not sure why I keep checking them almost every day. I think I just want to know what the outcome will be before I get my hopes up too much. This is probably partly because of the heartbreak of 2004, when [...]

Tags: 2008 Election, Obama

I first met Laurel at Bread Loaf several years ago, when she’d won a waiter scholarship there. I saw her again a few years after that at the AWP conference. It was three months after her first son was born, and she looked FANTASTIC. Seriously–she looked so gorgeous and put-together and well-spoken, I thought, wow, [...]

Tags: Alice Munro, Amaud Johnson, AWP, Dan Zanes, Judy Blume, Laurel Snyder, Matt de la Pena, Neil Gaiman, Sherman Alexie, YA lit

From Boing Boing: Random House is asking some of its authors of young adult books to sign contracts with “morality clauses” that allow the publisher to take back your advance and cancel your book if you’re caught doing anything that “damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, [...]

Bread Loaf was magical. I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it, how to explain how magical it was….I’m not sure I can capture it here, so that someone who’s never been could understand how special a place it is, but I’ll try… I first went to Bread Loaf when I was [...]

Tags: Bread Loaf, Bread Loaf writers conference

The comments feature hasn’t been working for the last few weeks, so I apologize to everyone who left comments that didn’t get posted. My Assiduous Website Manager (a.k.a. my sister Jackie) has been working to fix it, and it’s finally fixed now. Thank you, Jackie! addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmargorabb.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D70′; addthis_title = ‘Comments+snafu’; addthis_pub = ‘jackierabb’;