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An Interview with Sue Ann Jaffarian
What I know about Stories / February 25, 2016

How often do you get to interview one of your personal heroes? The first time I saw Sue Ann Jaffarian, I was too afraid to even speak to her.  She breezed into the middle of our low-key seminars one day, a bubbly, confident woman with a terrific smile.  She talked about her work as a paralegal but I was blown away by her other career as a much-published novelist with editors, a fan-base and everything!  Book-nut that I am, my mouth and brain slammed shut in the presence of this “sure-nuff” novelist.  At least I had the presence of mind to pick up some of her books.Since then I’ve had a lot of fun reading Sue Ann’s work, particularly her series starring that plus-sized paralegal Odelia Grey (finally, a heroine that looks and thinks like me!) and the Granny Apples series set in Julian, Californa, a place near my grandparents’ home.  Thanks to social media and a mutual friend or two, I finally worked up the nerve to (virtually) meet Sue Ann and she’s been kind enough to answer some of the questions I didn’t have the nerve to ask years ago.  How nice can a real author be? I…

Books My Mother Loved…

My mother loved historical fiction.  In the days when Erma Bombeck was the queen of domestic humor, and would be feminists felt caught between Betty Friedan (too serious) and Erica Jong (too randy) historical novels were a thinking woman’s guilty pleasure.  More serious than Barbara Cartland’s frothy stories, less licentious than the bodice and pants-bursting tales of the “Sweet Savage” series  and miles beyond the Harlequin romances, historical novels combined enough research and literary craft to create entertaining stories that someone wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading. About half of the stories were based on historic figures; the other stories were based around historic places and events.   The heroines weren’t always beautiful (at least they didn’t think they were) and while most of the stories still focused on a woman’s quest to achieve a happy home, husband and family, the traditional ending wasn’t guaranteed.  Mama had a ton of these books and I ran through them all while I was a kid.   At the time I thought they were terribly boring; I was in love with “the classics”.  The world must have have agreed with my teenaged self , because I don’t see many historical novels these…

The Future of Reading Stories

My friends and I like to debate the future of books and reading.  (For us, this has more appeal than politics or football.)  There are the pro-e-readers in the group who are looking to carry half of their libraries in their smart phones and there are the anti e-readers who are happiest with the traditional paper pages in their hand.   I enjoy the debates but until recently I believed the only difference between traditional and electronic books was the carrying case.  After all, they were both just printed words on a flat surface, right?  Nope.  When it comes to ebooks, words may be just the beginning. My favorite ereader has a nifty gadget: an incorporated dictionary that lets me highlight any word in the text I don’t know so the definition will pop up without me having to close the page.    There’s an encyclopedia link there too.  Very helpful.  Now I’ve learned that someone has developed ebooks for little kids that have animated pictures mixed in with the text and links in the text (like my dictionary) that helps youngsters understand new words.  Kids with the interactive and animated illustration books gained more in story understanding and vocabulary…

Books for the Mid-Winter Doldrums

February is a hard month to love.  Say all you want about the plucky groundhog, and rhapsodize on the romance of Cupid;  remember the Chinese New Year, American Presidents and throw in a good word for Leap Year but the truth doesn’t change: February in the Northern Hemisphere is a difficult month to love.  The Holiday Season disappeared ages ago and the pastel head of Spring is nowhere near to being seen on the horizon.  We may be looking at wind or rain next month but right now the weatherman’s two favorite words   are “freezing” and “snow” and the outside world almost seems drained of color.  In February, it’s hard to avoid getting depressed.   To keep the wraiths of February Depression at bay, may I suggest picking up a few books?  In their own ways, each of the following stories helps me through these days of relentless cold.  I hope they can help you too. If the rest of the world had to describe Jamaica in three words or less, their list would be: Poverty, Music, and Hot.  Politics, Drugs and Religion make the next list but they seem to have grown out of a civilization where life…

When True Genius Requires a Little Explanation
I know a Good Story / February 2, 2016

Some books are a hit for a day; some dominate the bestseller lists for a season.  One or two books can be considered touchstones for the decade but very few make it to true classic status.  But there is a work of fiction that seems like it never leaves the public consciousness.  In 150 years it has never been out of print, but it’s been adapted into almost two dozen films, five comic books, countless plays and electronic media and it’s probably the most quoted work of fiction in literature.  People either love it or hate it but everyone who reads knows there’s something special about Alice and her Adventures In Wonderland.  They linger in the mind. The joke of it is, this book has been loved and read for so long that a lot of the material Lewis Carroll referred to in this classic (and its sequel, Through The Looking Glass,) is no longer available to the regular reader.  We follow the serious-minded Alice through her nonsensical adventures and admire the imagination and poetry in the story so much we accept it without thoroughly understanding it.  So, I suggest you take the journey one more time and re-read Lewis…