The current president’s proposed budget eliminates funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, abolishes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, guts the Environmental Protection Agency, and slices community block grants to the bone. It gives more money to the military and, I assume, border walls. There doesn’t seem to be much logic behind the proposal, just a lot …
I learned to spot hypocrisy at an early age. As a teenager, I was a member of the Baptist church youth group. Our group was led by a twenty-something woman who also happened to be the leader of my school dance team for a time. I loved dancing. I loved movies about dancing. Footloose was my …
Like so many people across the country and around the world, I marched this weekend. My husband and I joined the crowd of about 200,000 men, women, and children in Denver. We walked and chanted and laughed and waved as we ran into people we knew from various places. We failed to meet up with …
I write fiction about working class and lower middle class people in the south. It’s not a popular choice. Readers don’t seem to know what to do with my characters. I don’t blame them. It’s not what they’ve come to expect from books set in the south. Most southern fiction tends to portray societal extremes: the …
At this time next week, the election will be over. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly remember what it feels like to live in a world without political advertisements and October surprises that are really just the same old news reported in a different way. I’m so glad I live in a …
The image of construction workers hooting and wolf-whistling at women is an old stereotype, but I grew up around men who worked construction and it doesn’t fit my experience. My father and my uncles and my cousins were ironworkers and welders and electricians. They didn’t make crass comments about women. Daddy was outraged when men called women names or …