Monday Quote: On Clarity

This week I’m revising a piece I wrote more than a year ago. Some passages seem less clear to me than they did on my last round of edits. This is true of everything I write. My words can always be more clear. As the French writer

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A New Vision

As a new decade takes shape, a new-and-better website will take shape here. My brilliant husband—a software architect by day, magician by night—is helping me re-imagine my online presence (I’m loathe to use this phrase, but as the experts say, even the literary world must adapt). Though

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(Re)writing History

My paternal grandmother was a young girl when she and her parents fled war-torn Greece for the United States. Beleaguered by the constant fighting between the Greeks and the Turks, they had seen family and friends slaughtered. America promised safety and shelter. My great-grandfather, Gus, landed in

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An Uncle With Flare

Today is my Uncle Dave’s birthday. He would be seventy-four. My mom’s younger brother died earlier this month, after battling complications from a single lung transplant. He takes with him a vast trove of memories and shared stories only he could retell, many of my mom. She

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From the Ground Up: Remembering 9/11

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a Washingtonian, living near the Pentagon and working as an education reporter. As I darted to the subway, the sky glowed a crystalline blue. Later, everyone from D.C. to New York exchanged stories about the otherworldly brightness of that morning. How

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To Begin Again

If summer is about the wide embrace of warmth and wandering at will, the school year keeps freedoms of its own. The first day reveals a brand-new stage where unseen possibilities begin to dance. It is a time to let go, fraught with questions and the promise

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One Cool Dad

My dad was cool. I didn’t see him that way when I was a kid. Once I became a parent myself, I came around to acknowledging he’d been a good parent. But it wasn’t until after he passed away that I glimpsed the cool guy he was

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