My top ten choices from almost 300 blog items.
The two big celebrations of Nancy Fox's life are done — the warm 'n' fuzzy in-person open house at her daughter's Novato home and the successful Zoom session that drew friends from all over the country (and Portugal), only a few of whom were digitally-challenged. Now...
The second celebration of Nancy Fox's life will take place this Sunday from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Pacific time, 7 to 8:30 Eastern, via Zoom. The format will be loose, with whomever wants to talk or do music doing just that, but with no speaking over another participant. I'd...
Nancy Fox, my wife/friend/concertmaster and collaborator for 36 years plus, died May 2. I will never forget her intelligence, charm, loveliness, and incredible sense of humor. An in-person, open house, celebration of her life will be held from 2 to 4:30 p.m. Pacific...
‘Tis the season in which folks often focus on family and friends.The Roving I, a mostly light-hearted book that was just released, does just that — focus on family and friends. But its 70 first-person columns also include some that feature serious stuff, and numerous...
Artist Joe Marciniak took an idea birthed by Woody Weingarten and turned it into a whimsical cover for the author’s newest book, The Roving I. That cover depicts Weingarten, his real-life head superimposed on a cartoon body replete with pot belly, meandering into the...
Every time I read a book, I end up savoring particular lines and storylines. That happened again when I re-read “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates,” even though it’s a fantasy I actually wrote with my granddaughter, Hannah Schifrin. I especially liked the notion...
I’m happy to present this guest post by Nancy Fox:
I was 16 when I met a skinny guy named Woody in suburban New York.
We ate pizza together.
Later, when I got back home in Detroit, he wrote letters to me. Letters and letters and more letters.
In one of them, he invited me to visit him at his Ivy League-type college. I went.
We fell in love. We got married.
But I didn’t know he’d get old, stop being skinny and still stay lovingly by my side for a lifetime (while I, of course, stayed absolutely just as young and every bit as skinny as I’d been my teens).
I’m happy to present this guest post by Callie Raab:
Years ago I wrote a children’s song about fantastical creatures having a race that included the lyric, “Some had eyes on their fingers and toes, a horn on their chin, or a tail on their nose.” They were such fun to draw that when I set about writing stories to help my dyslexic godson learn to read, I thought, “Why not create a whole world of bizarre flora and fauna?” Perhaps at the back of my mind were the fabulous critters that had piqued my childhood imagination in “If I Ran the Zoo” and other Dr. Seuss books.
Despite “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates” being a fantasy, it contains multiple parallels with the writers’ real lives. Consider, for example, when Lily and Grampy hurry to a pizza parlor where Lily and her bff, Penny, overstuff themselves “so much they had to use...
Where’d the idea for “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates” come from? Well, the mental magic actually started way back when, but without a single hocus-pocus, scepter or flying carpet. No magical tools whatsoever, in fact, just imagination. When was the “when”? Oh,...