France

A Martian in France

Letter from Paris March 2023 You don’t need to be a Martian to find French behaviour strange and mysterious, sometimes charming and curious, other times vaguely unsettling. You can simply be a citizen of any other country that is NOT France! I have been observing and cataloguing the strange and mysterious, curious and charming aspects of French behavior ever since […]

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Here We Go Again

PARIS, March-April, 2022 The year was 1962, the month October. I clearly remember my 16-year-old self standing still in a state of shock as I listened to the alarming reports and speculation about a possible nuclear war after U.S. intelligence reports showed that Russian missiles had been secretly placed in Cuba. Less than an hour

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Mayhem in Paris

Saturday, December 4: The phone rings as I am going outside and my husband signals me furiously with the hand that isn’t on the phone. “Be careful”, he mouthed. His friend on the other end of the line had called to see how we were because he had just watched “casseurs” (thugs) running down our

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You can take the girl out of Shenandoah–but you can’t take Shenandoah out of the girl

People sometimes wonder about me. Mostly, they wonder about how I got to Paris, France from Shenandoah, Iowa, and why I stayed. Actually, when I was in college in the not all that far away state of Michigan, people wondered, even asked me “how I got out of Iowa”. I would stare at them to

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How I made the switch from nonfiction to fiction

The following piece appeared in Global Geneva and I am happy to share the link. I wrote this for the Leading Edge section of this excellent ground-breaking publication. In it, I discourse on the huge difference between writing nonfiction and fiction and how I took the plunge. Click here to read. https://www.global-geneva.com/writing-a-novel-a-novel-experience-the-story-that-would-not-leave-me-alone/ When you read

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