The last few months have been a whirlwind. Even though I’ve been writing fiction all my life and dreaming of maybe, just maybe, someday after I’d finished raising kids and come to the end of my teaching career, I might try to get a novel published. Well, when it happened, I was, needless to say,…

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time exploring my grandparents’ house. (A huge, strange, monstrosity built in 1875 with material salvaged from a defunct Dutch Reformed church.) Its many rooms, nooks and crannies fired my imagination. I found old books and papers and junk whose owners had long since passed on.…