Welcome to my Prose Page.

Let me tell you about my two memoirs, my novel, and my collection of essays.

The two memoirs are A Fado for My Mother (Loxwood-Stoneleigh, 1996) and The Ripple Effect (Paul Mould, 2009). They are very different but overlap in the 1980s. Both are about events that landed in my lap and demanded to be described. My mother, resident in Indiana, died in 1981 in Lisbon. A complicated story ensued, and it involves her biography, the history of Portugal, music, and a few other things. Not many copies of the original printing remain, but there are a few.

The Ripple Effect is quite different, and a good deal lighter. It starts in 1980. My husband and I took our bicycles to Poland that summer, assuming the roads would be quiet and there would be interesting and picturesque towns and landscapes. How did I know I was going to have a close connection with Poland for the rest of my life? Again, the circumstances of that story demanded to be written. And again, only a few copies remain.

My novel, The Bohemian Pirate, is at least easily available from Amazon. The story takes place in a London coffeeshop of that name somewhere in the creases of the A-Z. Swithin, an academic at the nearby King Edward College, sits drafting his new book, while other customers wander in and often end up at his table, sharing their various opinions and experiences with him. The café is the day job of three actors whose friend, Beaufort, the West Indian builder, is in some kind of trouble with the police, but what can it be? And who is that visitor with the camera and the nice jacket? OMG, it’s the author!

The GWTW Fortnight, also easily available from Amazon, is the result of my reading Gone with the Wind exactly 50 years after first reading it as a teenager. I loved it at 16, but would I still, at 66, think is was so great? I was curious to find out. I wrote 14 essays on various aspects of the novel that struck me as I reread it, pen in hand. Certain scenes and characters and themes of Margaret Mitchell’s classic jumped out at me and I explored them, hoping they might interest other fans of this underrated novel. It is widely thought—based more on the movie than the novel—to be a nostalgic romance of the Old South, whereas it is neither nostalgic nor a romance and is set during the chaotic period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. If anything, it is anti-nostalgic. The moral of this is that you can’t tell a book by its movie. Visit The GWTW Fortnight Facebook page.