My husband showed me a TikTok video the other day of a chicken high-tailing it across a field headed for the henhouse, while a hawk swoops down repeatedly trying to snatch it. The people filming the video are too far away to help, but they’re screaming at the chicken. “Go, RUN, go, go, go!” Some...
Since rewatching the broadcast of Come From Away—the Broadway musical now streaming on Apple TV— I’ve had the song “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” stuck in my head. We sang it often at mass when I was growing up, and I found it to be not only a beautiful melody, but wonderfully aspirational...
When I was in college, I worked at a popular Mexican restaurant. Every Friday night, I’d watch my friend who was a cocktail server maneuver around the packed lobby delivering drinks to customers who were waiting to be seated. One day I asked her, “How do you carry those trays of drinks through all those...
My husband passed a coworker in the hall the other day and said, “How are you?” The man responded, “Fantastic.” My husband said, “Wow, that’s great.” The man said, “When someone asks you how you are, always say fantastic. No one wants to hear about your problems.” This strikes me as sad. I agree with...
I read an interesting article recently about how men talk to women entrepreneurs about their new projects or businesses. They tend to issue warnings about pitfalls and to caution the women, as if they’re not aware of the challenges and don’t know what they’re doing. Women, on the other hand, tend to give the speaker...
Recently, I was interviewed for Veteran Voices: The Oral History Podcast. The show features people who tell veterans’ stories in creative and interesting ways, including oral historians, authors, poets, playwrights, videographers, photographers, etc. The host, Kevin Farkas, invited me to talk about my World War II novels, all of which are based on real people...
Anthony Doerr recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See. And his book is not only noteworthy, it’s popular. It seems as if everyone I know has read or is reading that story, including one of my relatives, who is one of the sharpest...