Megan didn’t care whether the storm raged for the rest of the night. Let the thunder roll through the valley. Let the lightning crash through the orchards. Let the rain force Antietam Creek to overflow its banks. None of it compared to the ire in her heart. “How can you be so stubborn?” she asked her…
Charles Dickens’s manuscript for A Christmas Carol lies open in a great hall of books, the Morgan Library in New York City. There it is by the great fireplace in a plexiglas box. Children await a story time, based on the popular novel. Visitors file through the room, examining the Gutenberg Bible, the various musical scores…
I had to have this little magnet the minute I saw it. If Charlotte Bronte had resisted the urge to write — lady writers weren’t well regarded in her day — I never would have met Jane Eyre. I can’t imagine going through life without the courageous heroine of this beloved novel. My mother gave me Jane…
Ann Patchett, the author of Bel Canto and her newest, Commonwealth, was having lunch with Ralph Fiennes. It was during her freelancing days and she had flown to London to interview him. He was at the height of his “Ralph Fiennes-ness,” Patchett quipped. After a waiter came up and told Fiennes he was an actor too, she…
I’ve joined a prestigious group of authors. I’ve been rejected. I got my first rejection letter for my first novel. It’s far from my first rejection letter. I’ve been turned down for magazine and newspaper articles plenty of times. I wrote a children’s book back in the 1990s and got that rejection letter on paper…
My first historical novel is finished. With tears and sniffles, I closed the book and said good-bye to my first heroine, Maureen. She is a feisty one, an 18 year old Irish immigrant, who goes on a quest to find her brother in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in any…
Mary K. Tilghman, writer 