I’m not sure when I first got the idea that I wanted to create an exhibit of images that related to my novel, Gina in the Floating World. I do know that I ma...

This post is my third family remembrance in just over three weeks. The three members of my nuclear family all died in the springtime, and each year, on the a...

Today is the 19th anniversary of the death of my mother. In 2010, I wrote this post in remembrance of her in a blog I maintained for several years called "M...

March 16 is the sixteenth anniversary of the death of Beth Brett, my sister, and mother to Pippa. On the eighth anniversary of her death, Pippa (who lives in...

On the cold, dark days of winter, with snow and ice on the ground, I achieve my daily 10,000 Fitbit steps by jogging (slowly) in front of the TV. For a while...

The first draft of my novel, Gina in the Floating World, reflected my own experiences as a foreign bar hostess in a Tokyo suburb in the mid-1970s. As an expe...

For those of you who missed my book launch at Porter Square Books on October 2, 2018, I present below the text of my presentation. In general, I am not a goo...

After writing the first draft of Gina in the Floating World, I searched for other novels set in Japan with a young, female, and gaijin (foreign) protagonist....

In addition to being a writer, I am also an artist. I work in several media, but one of my favorite is paper or mixed media collage. Currently, I am working ...

(Image from Amazon.com) It may feel like an arbitrary year, but I chose 1981 quite intentionally as the year in which Gina in the Floating World takes place....

As I prepared for my interview with Mr. K, the club owner, I worried about my lack of glamour. I had all the wrong clothes and the wrong look. My skirts were...

The rain poured down in opaque sheets outside the American Express office in Tokyo, where I collected my mail, and considered my alternatives for the afterno...