The 60s was a time when the relationships between the Blacks and the Whites grew embarrassingly red for many. The shame of it all is brilliantly captured in Kathryn Stockett’s…
The Help: Black and White and Red All Over
Hemingway, A Master of Less Is More, More or Less
Ernest Hemingway was the master of saying a lot with less. Everything I read suggests novice writers—and some published writers—use too many words to get their point across. They use…
The Many Paths of Inspiration
I’ve written about inspiration before, but I gave it short shrift. The Encarta dictionary defines inspiration as: “stimulation for the human mind to creative thought or the making of art”.…
Harry Brown Meets Network
Some writers seem clairvoyant. Gary Young the screenwriter of the film, Harry Brown, certainly seems to be one of them. He showed inequities in one country’s social system before they…
Writing About Yearning In Fiction And Memoirs
Everyone wants a book that keeps them glued to the page. The ones that have me reading past bedtime are stories about family or some kind of skewed relationship or…
Truth and Fiction in the Writing of Memoirs
My mother is a born storyteller. When I was young, I paid little attention; but when I became a mother myself, I began to jot down her anecdotes. I am…
Passion: The Driving Force
I sometimes wonder what keeps me day after day, hour after hour, year after year sitting in front of a computer, working on stories. I struggle to find the right…
Taking A Break To De-clutter The Mind
Since I’ve been up to my eyeballs trying to figure out the next steps in my writing life —and getting confused as to which direction to take—I took a break…
A Whole Empire Walking
Since I was old enough to comprehend, my mother has bent my ear with stories of how awful it was in the old country, before she immigrated to Canada when…
Cipher at Tulsa International Film Festival
CIPHER, a short film my grandson, Michael Stevantoni, directed, shot and edited has just been selected for the Tulsa International Film Festival Sept. 22-25, 2011. As a writer with aspirations…