Yesterday, the Botetourt County Historical Society, Inc. held its 16th Founders Day Dinner at Virginia Mountain Vineyards in Fincastle. A fe...

  My fingertips are blackened with ink!  This makes me very happy. I have been going through old newspapers, looking at articles I wrote 30 ...

The article above, which published on December 3, 1986, was one of my first award-winning articles. I won a Virginia Press Association award...

I don't know that I've posted this ever before, but I was going through some old papers and found the very first article I ever had ...

When I was taking Advanced Placement English in high school (it was, in theory, college level English), I remember a little argument I had w...

On Saturday, March 23, I went to the Fincastle Library to hear a local author talk about her book, West of Santillane . The book is about Ju...

On March 16, my husband and I went to Salem to visit a sale of local book authors. I knew several of them and I like to support the local wr...

When I was 5, my father had me and my brother in a vehicle when he stopped at a convenience store on Apperson Drive. I don't recall what...

You really can't trust Mondays. One never knows what a Monday will bring. Today brought me more of the same viral thing that I've ha...

  Today I finished up an editing project. It was a lot of work, and I was pleased with the job I did. The manuscript was interesting and tha...

The evening took us away from our house and to an event hall filled with people, many of whom we knew. The occasion was the celebration of a...

Way back when in the old days of journalism, the local media fed off of one another. I could see when the local TV station, for example, had...

Over the weekend, an Oklahoma newspaper with no online presence printed this as its front page of its weekend edition: You can hear Rachel M...

  I found this amusing, but also sad. Subscriptions to newspapers are dying - we're dinosaurs, my husband and me, who subscribe still to...

Many years ago, perhaps around 2003, I went to interview an older woman named Emily. She was in charge of the local historic society and ran...

In the past year, I found Louise Penny's books about Armand Gamache, Chief Inspector of Homicide for the police force in Quebec. (There ...

A very long time ago, a writer friend of mine . . . stopped writing. She'd been a columnist for The Roanoke Times for a very long time,...

A very long time ago, back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s, I knew how to find a job. I opened the newspaper and I read the "he...

These quotes are from Zen in the Art of Writing , by Ray Bradbury. 1. To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill. 2. Self-consciousness...