Follow Joanne on Substack
Going forward, all my new blog posts will appear on Substack. This will give us a cleaner, more reliable way to stay connected.
I began this blog four years ago with modest ambition. Once a month I would pause from writing fiction or other work and weave disparate threads of the month’s events and my thoughts together and share in this new form: the blog post. The posts have often had international themes and freedom of expression themes…
On the eve of Christmas in December 1914 and 1915 in the middle of World War I British and German forces faced each other in the trenches across battle lines and called a temporary truce. On fields in France and Belgium, the troops climbed out of their trenches and played games of football in No…
I’m at the bottom of a cave inside a rock riddled with tunnels dug over the centuries, including during World War II when Allied Forces excavated miles of tunnels to protect themselves and their ammunition from enemy forces. At the bottom of this cave is the legendary home of the Gates of Hades–the Underworld–in Greek…
London: Memory accelerates as I look at the wet London street through the window of Sticky Fingers restaurant. For six years Sticky Fingers was our family gathering place and adopted kitchen. We lived nearby, and I would often claim a booth by the window where I ate lunch, spread out my papers and wrote through…
The sun glints off the waves of the Bosporus as the wind skims across the surface of the water, and power boats, tourist ships and ferries cruise between the shores of Europe and Asia on Istanbul’s great waterway. I’ve arrived to an Indian summer in this city at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the…
The air is surprisingly cool for late August. I’m sitting on an upstairs porch looking out over the tops of trees in their full dress of summer greens—maples, magnolias, dogwoods with white blossoms. The branches and leaves sway and rustle in the breeze. Somewhere a wind chime answers the moving air with a light ting…
We were five PEN members in Beijing, proceeding to Hong Kong where we’d been invited to celebrate Independent Chinese PEN Center’s (ICPC) tenth anniversary. It happened also to be the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party in China as large commemorative plaques proclaimed in Tiananmen Square. And it was the 90th anniversary of PEN International.…
(The excerpt below is from a larger article about the poet and teacher Elliott Coleman in the recent Fortnightly Review: ) I was 20 years old, applying to Johns Hopkins graduate Writing Seminars from a small Midwestern college. I had come to campus to meet Elliott Coleman, the director and founder of the program. He…
When I began this blog, I promised…who? myself mostly, a few friends, family that I would post once a month. Most of the months I’m burrowing away on fiction, on the long process of writing a novel–writing, rewriting, thinking, rethinking. It is a different discipline to pull away from that marathon of 400+ pages and…
It rained every day on the Bosporus as we ferried back and forth across Istanbul’s grand waterway to discuss current and impending conflicts in the globe. Inside the windowless room, sitting in a large square facing each other, former presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, ambassadors and a former NATO commander toured the world in words…
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