Writerly Notes
For friends and readers who have asked, I am no longer writing my quarterly ecard (Writerly Notes) but I will again share my thoughts and resources here on my Jots page. There is so much change afoot but literature is not dead or dying; we are all simply learning new ways to communicate this great art form.

Lyrical Works
Last year I raved about Tinkers, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer — a lyrical work by Paul Harding whose background was in music before he wandered into writing and into the Iowa Writers's Workshop. Friends know I am taken by great works of prose-poetry and they recommended James Galvin’s 1993 novel, The Meadow. Galvin is a poet by trade, and he takes us on an elegant tour of 100 years of ranching along the Wyoming and Colorado borders without losing any of the grit and simplicity of that world.

Favorite Reads
Arundhati, Roy. The God of Small Things.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying.
Fitzgerald, Kitty. Pigtopia.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower.
Galvin, James. The Meadow.
Gloss, Molly. The Jump-Off Creek.
Graves, Robert. I, Claudius.
Harding, Paul. Tinkers.
Haruf, Kent. Plainsong.
Hemon, Alexander. The Lazarus Project.
Karr, Mary. The Liar’s Club.
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
McCarthy, Cormac. Border Trilogy.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Murr, Naeem. The Perfect Man.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin.
McCann, Colum. Let the Great World Spin.
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.
Wodehouse, P.G. The Code of the Woosters.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse.