Ruth
If You Want To Write
“The guys that wrote the best songs were the guys that wrote the most songs.” That was said by the daughter of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? If you want to be good at writing, you need to do as much writing as you can. And there’s a corollary to [...]
A Writer of Vermont
Until I moved to Vermont I thought I would always be a reader of other people’s stories. But after I had lived here for a few years, I began to want to show people what late twentieth century Vermont was like in all its wonderful complexity. What I try to do is to write the [...]
Free Books
Would you like a free copy of one of my books? I want to get them in the hands of readers, so I have decided to send them to people who would like to read them. I haven’t decided how many to give away. I’ll decide that later. I published THE SIMPLE LIFE in 2006. [...]
A Good Chicken House
Our chickens live in a discarded ambulance. It’s the body of the ambulance mounted on a flatbed trailer, so we can move it. We move the chicken house (with the chickens inside) into the vegetable garden in the late fall when the garden is finished for the year. The chickens spend the winter there, scratching [...]
An Idea of How to Publish a Book
I published both of my novels myself. I don’t mean that I hired a vanity press. My husband, Bill and I did it by creating a publishing company of our own. We hired a designer and a small press, and they contracted out the job of printing the books. By following the instructions in a [...]
Reading To Mother
Mother has always loved to read more than anything else. That’s not surprising since she is the daughter of Max Perkins, the book editor who published Hemingway and Wolfe and Fitzgerald. He said, “Nothing is as important as a book can be.” About ten years ago, Mother’s eyes began to fail from macular degeneration. It [...]
Is The Score Even?
On a beautiful May evening last year, the beaver dam in Adamant village broke open letting a wall of water pour through the town. It destroyed the road and flooded the basement of a woman’s house, ruining her furnace. There are two ponds, one on each side of the crossroads that is the center of [...]
A Week Later
It’s a steamy, overcast day, a week after Vermont’s disastrous floods. You might think we were back to summer, until you looked around. Then you see that the green is not so green, that there’s starting to be some yellow in the leaves and grass. The air seems different. The crows are gathering into groups. [...]
Cutting Hay
Of all the farm-related jobs we do in a year, getting the hay in is probably the most fun. It’s hard work, and it can be dangerous, but we need lots of hands to help, so it’s a social occasion too, an outdoor party with a guarantee of good weather, although there have been times [...]
Vermont Woman Review November 2009
This isn’t a new review, although it was new to me. I only found out about it a month ago. I have only included part of Amy Lilly’s review. If you want to see the whole thing go to: Vermont Woman article Novel Gift Choices That Won’t Be Returned to Sender By Amy Lilly Fiction [...]
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