For many months I saved the spam in my laurabenedict.com email account because I was getting so many interesting character names from it. But I would dump them after I got three or four hundred because I got paranoid about keeping all that trash around. Mostly I get Viagra offers and other opportunities to “enhance …Read More

(Amazing image by Amaroo.) I’m a little jealous of my poet friends–not just because they work magic with so few words, but because their work is so, well, portable. More than portable. It’s pithy as well. Prose writers have a tougher time expressing complete themes and ideas on a single manuscript page. If we’re doing …Read More

One of Bengal’s favorite books in our house is his sister’s battered copy of Seymour Simon’s STRANGE MYSTERIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD. He loves to read to us from it, never tiring of the tales of The Crystal Skull, the Tunguska Explosion, the ghost ship Mary Celeste and details about mysterious lights in the night …Read More

I collect photographs by a man named Wallace Nutting. You can read about him here and here. But it’s not the man who interests me–it’s his work. He hand-colored his early twentieth-century photographs of rural Americana, making them lovelier, richer, more dramatic than the photographs alone would have been. I’m fascinated by this twice-removed notion …Read More

It seems I mention the novel REBECCA a lot. But I love Hitchcock’s film as well. Have you seen the BBC program That Mitchell and Webb Look? They do a lot of funny things, but this sketch is brilliant!

My dreams are filled with people these days, strangers who come onto our land, and into our house. Their faces are vivid. They might be people I’d see on the streets in town, or at the mall, or driving in cars–anywhere. In one dream, several of them have set up tents in our driveway, their …Read More

If you know me, you know what a sucker I am for Project Runway. Actually, the whole family is addicted–even Bengal, our eight year-old, will comment on the challenges. He knows that one really should stay away from produce during the Make-an-Outfit-at-the-Winn-Dixie challenge. Though it worked out for Korto last week. (Love the kimono look, …Read More