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For my final 2016 Philadelphia Inquirer column, I took a train to the city with the men I love and stood at Cira Green, looking down, across, into, and through.

I was seeking perspective of a personal and political kind following a tremulous year.

My thanks to Kevin Ferris, who allows me to seek and speak in my hometown paper on a monthly basis.

Happiness to you all. Peace in this season. Hope.

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Today I share news of an upcoming one-day memoir workshop, to be conducted next October 15, 2017 at Longwood Gardens. Information is available here. Sign-ups begin in a week. Class size is limited. I'm thinking we all could use a turn in a beautiful place. I know I could.

Meanwhile, in this hard right now, when violent forces swirl, afflict, threaten, when words (abused, thwarted, erased of meaning) take on a life of their own, I have been pondering democracy and private lives lived out in public places. I wrote about the dark of that and the possible light in that for today's Philadelphia Inquirer, a story that can be found here. I centered my search for meaning in a famous Philadelphia square.

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So grateful for this opportunity in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.

I'll post the live link tomorrow.

In the meantime, for more on this book—the reviews, the story—please go here.

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In honor of our friend Mike Yasick, his son Chris, their entire family, and those who have been diagnosed with a rare and crushing disease known as VEDS, I write today in the Philadelphia Inquirer of the launch of Red Pants Project, which asks each of to take a moment to celebrate the people in our lives.

The story is here.

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I close my year with the Philadelphia Inquirer with this story about an old railroad bridge that has been converted into a walking/biking trail that connects the city and the suburbs, the past and the present, and, indeed, all of us—no matter where we come from, no matter what languages we prefer to speak, no matter which heritages we are celebrating.

With thanks to Kevin Ferris, for allowing me to explore ideas—and to hope out loud.

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Now that our son is out on his own—a transplanted Manhattanite, a guy with an intense new-media career and plenty of stories to tell—these four Thanksgiving days are the days I most live for. Our longest stretch with him this near. Our longest walks. Our longest conversations. The thorough peace of waking up and thinking: He's just down the hall.

I arranged my motherhood so that I would have few motherhood regrets—hoped myself toward a freelance career that would spark to life when my son was at school or slept, stayed off the traveling writers' circuit, patchworked my existence. If I've sometimes felt invisible out there in the world, I've felt seen here, in this two-bedroom house, and these past few days especially I've felt more like my authentic, true-purpose self than I have since, well, last Thanksgiving.

We discovered a new trail together. We lit a candle at our table. We asked ourselves that enduring question: How do we continue to become the person we'd most like to be? And for an hour yesterday I opened my laptop and read pages from a book now very much in progress. My son is the best listener I'll ever have, the one who gets every nuance and bend of the real life I plumb into the depths of my fiction. The one who says, Okay, but let me ask you a question, and, Do you know a real-life Matias? and, Is Uncle Davy modeled on your Uncle Danny, and Yes. I see it. This could be your movie.

Last night, late, my son sat at the table and read this story in this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer. It's the story I'd written about the Philadelphians I've lately met in my Love: A Philadelphia Affair travels. The people whose stories make our city what it is. I watched him read. I watched him nod. I saw him smile. Because my son may be living the NYC life right now, but he still considers Philadelphia home. This place we share and always will—no matter where he is, no matter what he's doing, no matter the miles between us.

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In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, I'm remembering a recent day spent alongside my father, at Longwood Gardens. We made our way to the meadow. We stood on the cusp of a season. We thought about the summer we had shared packing up his beautiful home, and about all that might come next.

That story can be found in full here, along with an invitation to join me and Marciarose Shestack at the Free Library of Philadelphia this coming Wednesday evening, at 7:30, as we talk about our love for this city.

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One single man unites three cities, also the world. He wears white. He raises his hand. He stops his Fiat to kiss a young boy on a head, to touch a baby, to nod at an Argentine flag, to laugh at something, to mime a quick sprint. He speaks, at a mass, of St. Katherine. He honors educators and peacemakers. He talks about the power of being individually different together and about the devastations of attempting global sameness.

Celebrate your history.

Celebrate your culture.

Celebrate our many languages.

He celebrates the immigrant, reminds those who must be reminded that we, here in America, we, here, in Philadelphia, are all products of movement; my own Italian great-grandfather became a naturalized citizen not even 100 years ago. He asks us to look past walls and barriers. To be honest with each other. To seek out peace, to stop perpetuating damage, to hold together family and family life.

Money, fame, celebrity, awards, job titles: These things do not impress him. He prefers his own shoes, his own small apartment, his single suitcase of possessions.

We are watching him, learning from him, studying the skies (the morning hue here is the brightest pink). We are celebrating with those, like Sister Kimberly Miller, who have stood in his presence. We are praying for him today, another long day, and we will be praying for him, as his plane departs tonight, and then after, when he has more meetings to attend to, another continent to greet and to inspire.

Make the peace, he says. Or to keep it.

Be honest.

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In the Philadelphia Inquirer today I'm thinking about serenity—how we need it, where we find it—at Andalusia, along the Delaware River.

A link to the story is here.

A link to my blog post about the children I met and taught at this Biddle mansion is here.

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I have written of the weekend we spent in Moravian Bethlehem—of the happy times we had among friends old and new. Today I'm talking more about those three days—and the idea of home—in the Inquirer.

The story begins like this, below, and can be found in full here.

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Two Wednesday evenings ago, I ventured into Media (a town I've lately been rediscovering) to participate in the eighth-season kick-off of the grandness known as Dining Under the Stars(TM). Some 3,000 people were out beneath threatening (but never daunting) skies as more than two dozen restaurants wheeled their delectables into the street. Bob Deane, potter extraordinaire, was his beguiling self. Earth & State had its shine on. Flowers grew between trolley tracks.

The dazzle razzle of that story is here.

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The annual Little Flower Teen Writers Festival is a school-wide celebration of writing and reading—a marvel of an invention in which a school, on a sunny Saturday, opens its doors to story weavers and student hearts. The dynamic, unstoppable Sister Kimberly Miller leads the way. Her girls wouldn't be anywhere else. And yesterday all of us who were in attendance were given keynote words from A.S. King that leapt us to our feet (yes, that's a deliberate inversion of language logic, but that's so what happened). King is one of those writers who has earned her status as a star. Her stories are essential. Her sentences are prime. And when she gets up there behind a microphone she has something actual to say—words that belong to her, ideas unborrowed.

I left Little Flower, rushed home, put on a skirt, swapped out my graffiti boots for a pair of four-inch heels, picked up the cake I'd made the day before, and headed out again to celebrate the career of Greg Djanikian, the exquisite Armenian poet whose life and work I profiled in the Pennsylvania Gazette last year. Greg is stepping down from full-time administrative duties at Penn so that he might write more and live less bounded-ly. Saddened as we are by the thought of seeing him less, last night was anything but a sad event. It brought together (in true Greg fashion) the teachers, writers, and student advocates who give Penn's creative writing program and Kelly Writers House their aura. Oysters, sherbet-colored shirts, an undaunted cat. Talk about food carts, the meaning of words, 1960, serial memoirists (the third Fuller), astonishing turns in storied careers, the art of the frittata, and the costs and high rewards of loving students. Sun when we arrived and stars when we left.

In between the two events, Kit Hain Grindstaff sent word of something wholly unforeseen—a Guardian review of Going Over. It begins like this below and can be read in full here.

Lyrical prose, beautiful and sensual imagery, a dark setting; yet, hope: there is always hope – because for the stars to shine, there needs to be darkness. Going Over just shot to my 'favourites' of 2015 list and I regret nothing. This book is graffiti, and colour and play dough and bikes. It is love, it is death, it is life; it is astronomy, maps, escapes and archery. It is a wall, splitting the earth with dark and hateful ideologies, and it is a spring in your step on one side: pink hair and coloured moles with a quiet and thoughtful being on the other; scope in hand, love clenched in heart and freedom circling though mind. Going Over is Ada and Stefan, Savas and Meryem, Turks and Germans and kids and adults. It is a story of humans and their plight in this world, and it is a story of love.

As is perhaps clear in this recent Huffington interview, I've been thinking a lot of late about what happiness is. I wrote toward that in today's Philadelphia Inquirer story, which has Frenchtown, NJ, as its backdrop. (Thank you Kevin Ferris and your team for another beautiful presentation of my photographs and words.) I've been also thinking a lot about kindness (never simple, often rare), thanks in part to George Hodgman's glorious memoir Bettyville, which I reviewed for the Chicago Tribune, here.

Today there is sun out there, flowering trees, wet-headed daffodils. I'm going to celebrate by finishing the fabulous Between You and Me (Mary Norris) and later checking into Chanticleer garden for the first time this year. I'm way overdue for a visit.

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Once each month I contribute a story and photographs to the Philadelphia Inquirer, stories about the intersection of memory and place. Most recently I traveled back to the Gaskill Street trinity I'd shared with my husband early in our marriage and remembered, with the help of Julia Zagar of Eye's Gallery and Isaiah Zagar fame, the neighborhood and its evolution. I wanted to know what parts of my memory could be validated. I wanted to know, among other things, how others remembered the wow of art that lived just down the street from me—the rag-rug lady, the Christmas party thrower, the man who had painted his car, his street, his telephone pole the colors of Woodstock.

Had it all been just a dream?

I meandered, took photos, wrote, and the Inquirer published that story here.

After that, the story kept changing.

Friends and strangers got in touch with memories of the rag-rug lady I'd mentioned in the tale. Others remembered, for me, parades. Others said, I live there now or I lived there then. Reconstitutions. Plastic memory.

And then this past Thursday, I returned from a job to a phone message from a certain Ruth Drake, now living in Woodstock, New York. Call me, she said.

So I did.

Ruth Drake, as it turns out, held all the missing pieces of my story.  She had been told by a friend about the Inquirer spread. She had heard, in the lines read to her over the phone, reference to the man she had married and loved—that artist referred to, in my story, as Bud Franklin.

My husband, Ruth Drake said. (Bud) Franklin Drake.

And there it was—the full name I'd been searching for. And there was more, now, so much more, that Ruth was saying—about her husband's degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, about his one-man shows, about that crazy car with the mattress spring crown and the flower-power colors that was parked out on our street. Ruth remembered with me the rag-rug lady—Ella, she said, who had been raised in a lighthouse. She affirmed the existence of the man who had lived across the street and filled his home with a Christmas tree so huge it had to be stuffed in through an upstairs window. She said that Bud had planted morning glories in a pot on their stoop and encouraged them to grow skyward, and oh, how they did. She said that she, Ruth, had gone off each morning with her corporate gloves to her corporate work and then come home to Bud's great spirit.

We'd been neighbors all those years ago. He'd painted the neighborhood, even painted a bump on the street. He'd led parades. His art was his power. I was young and watched, an outsider. I didn't know half of how lucky I was to be there then.

(Bud) Franklin Drake lived a fascinating life. Ruth hinted at the details as we spoke. At years spent in Manhattan while Ruth worked on Wall Street. At a painted Cadillac limo that attracted the eye of (among many others) the Rolling Stones. At the Drakes' colorful entry to Philadelphia in that same Caddy—Mayor Rizzo's police surrounding that car until well-heeled Ruth and her petite mother emerged and asked, sweetly, "Is there some trouble, officers?"

There was so much to tell, and Ruth told it so well, and I promised I would complete my Gaskill Street story here. (Bud) Franklin Drake wasn't just the wild-hearted artist on a street where I lived years ago. He was a well-respected, studio-famous artist whose work can still be found here, on the Franklin Drake Gallery.

Often it's not the words we write that make the difference. It's the conversations they stir.

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Last Friday I pushed away from the desk, went out into the air, and returned to South and Gaskill Streets. I rediscovered some of my own history. I talked with Julia Zagar about her husband's remarkable mosaics (Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia's Magic Gardens). I remembered.

The story is here, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Huge thanks to Kevin Ferris and to Amy Junod, page designer, who used six of my photographs for this piece. I'm sort of overwhelmed. I'm very grateful. Thank you.

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Oh, that Philadelphia Inquirer. Oh, Kevin Ferris and your design team. You make waking up every fourth Sunday such a pleasure. Thank you for the glorious celebration of the Reading Market in today's Inquirer. I loved writing this piece and taking those photographs. I love being a Philadelphian.

The story can be read in its entirety here.

This essay is one of three dozen that will appear in LOVE: A PHILADELPHIA AFFAIR, due out from Temple University Press next fall. More on that here.

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A year from now, Temple University Press will release Love: A Philadelphia Affair, a collection of thirty-six essays on the intersection of memory and place. Thirty-eight of my black-and-white photographs will accompany the text.

Some twenty of those essays first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer—pieces I was lucky enough to write for Inquirer editors Avery Rome and Kevin Ferris. Others have been written over the past few months for the book itself, taking me into and around the city on days of rain and sun to consider the streets, the architecture, the gardens, the sidewalks, the highs, the lows, and the communities that have played such a powerful role in the ways that I see, the books that I write, and the stories I teach. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, Dangerous Neighbors (1876 Philadelphia), Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (1871 Philadelphia), Small Damages, Handling the Truth, and even One Thing Stolen all reflect, in different ways, my love for this region and the people I have met here.

My great thanks to Micah Kleit, Ann Marie Anderson, and Gary Kramer at Temple University Press for helping me to see this dream through. My deep gratitude to Kevin Ferris and Avery Rome, who made my writing about this region such a pleasure. And huge appreciation to my agent Amy Rennert, who saw the details of this project through.

Micah and I wrapped the book up yesterday, from an editorial and photography perspective. I can't wait to hold this book in my hands, to be able to tell the world again and in new ways why I love where I live.

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Today, authors and illustrators from across the state of Pennsylvania are out in force, speaking up for libraries as part of the PA Forward campaign, a Pennsylvania Library Association initiative designed to shine the light on what libraries do and why they are vital to the communities in which we live.

As part of that initiative, I reflected back through the years—on the libraries I have known, the shelter they have provided, and the books they have helped me write. Hanby Jr. High Library (pictured above). Radnor Memorial Library. Van Pelt Library. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Free Library of Philadelphia. These and so many other libraries have been essential to my life, my work, my process, and I celebrate them and PA Forward in the Op/Ed pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer today, here.

I'm also heading out to Downingtown West, where I'll spend the day talking with students about libraries and about the most recent book—the Berlin Wall novel Going Over—that was born, in part, of stacks and microfilm. Just three days until the world remembers the 25th anniversary fall of the Berlin Wall, I'll say. And then we'll be off and talking.

With thanks to Margie Stern and all the librarians. And a special thanks to Michelle Nass, my Downingtown hostess with the mostest for the day.

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Today, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, some thoughts about "Psychylustro," the Mural Arts installation that has redefined how SEPTA and AMTRAK passengers see—and perhaps think about—Philadelphia's industrial past.

The entire story can be found here.http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20141012_Art_among_the_ruins.html

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I had planned to title this post "Two Weddings, One Singer, and a Tower," but things got rearranged this morning when it became clear that all the photos I took during my yesterday-long city jaunt are stuck on a malfunctioning photo stick. Imagine, then, that you are glancing at images of newly married happiness, Old City art, a Reading Market singer, and Philadelphia's now-famous pop-up beach. If I can rescue the photos from oblivion. I will share such things in time.

In the meantime, I moved from writing about sidewalks and nearly subterranean Philadelphia last month in the Inquirer to writing about Philadelphia from on high (City Hall) this time around. That story can be found here.

Today, following morning worship with my dad and a happy-making baby shower with dear friends, I'll be back in the city, on the banks of the Schuylkill, for the FLOW Festival with Fairmount Water Works, where a variety of artists are gathering in celebration of the river. Drip Drums, Sonic States, Splash Organ, and Fishway River Net Flood Stories will all be on display, and the day will end with a Grand Finale Light Show that will include, in multimedia fashion, words from Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. Look for my neon green walking shoes, end of spectacular day.

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Yesterday we went off in search of a river trail—an end of summer drive through corn country—and discovered a hamburger festival in (but of course) the town of Hamburg. One of those sweet surprises that puts an exclamation mark against the word adventure. I'd been anticipating a sleepy, overcast river walk. But when we arrived, I found the Supreme Woodstock of beefy festivals instead. Dozens upon dozens of hamburger chefs out on the street alongside musicians and leashed pigs and roller derby queens, the crafts people and the wood carvers, the hat wearers and the cigar smokers, the people having a beautiful time. It was as if I'd gone on a one-day European vacation. It was an hour and a half drive and a whole other country. I loved it.


I love, too, my collaboration with Kevin Ferris of the Inquirer, who gives me room to write about the Philadelphia places or experiences that I hope will resonate with those who have meandered through or wondered about our city. Many months ago, while we were chatting, Kevin suggested that I study the sidewalks of the city and see what they might reveal. And so one day, I set out on a sidewalk walk, then wrote the story that begins like this:
and continues here.

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We reach a certain juncture in life and we realize that there's only so much time left to us now. We look back and ask, Have we done enough, loved enough, been enough? We look ahead and ask, What now?

I have always been real with myself; I have known the me within. What are my passions? Children and stories. What have I done? Raised a son I love more than any story can tell and written books that a handful of kind souls have read. I've been flat-out lucky to publish as many books as I have, given the sales that I've had. I've been unimaginably blessed to be given the chance to take my stories into classrooms and into the open hearts of the young. I learn from them, again and again. Frankly, I love them.

Two Tuesdays ago I taught at a multi-week camp for young scientists and activists at the Fairmount Water Works. The camp is called Project FLOW. My privilege is to get the children thinking and writing about the soul of the river, akin to my own work in Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (Temple University Press). Kevin Ferris and the Inquirer team made the moment even brighter when agreeing to publish my photo essay (which includes the work of the young people) about that morning.

I'll provide the link when it goes live tomorrow. A few more photos from last week's post are here.

In the meantime, below, all of the children of the 2014 Project FLOW. Here they are listening to Sashoya read from her brilliant river creation myth.
Finally, thanks to my friend, the poet Kate Northrop, whose poem "Things Are Disappearing Here" got us all started.

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All week long I am thinking about ambition. The things we want and why we want them. The adjuration of enough.

I sit in the home of a poet and listen to him speak about choosing family over notoriety, quiet meals over the blustery pursuit of being widely known. I count the consequences of yearning for more - more opportunity, more visibility, more success, whatever success actually is. I think about how much more honest and unthwarted friendship means than a you-are-the-winner life.

Blustery pursuits. More and more. It can be dangerous stuff.

I'm still pondering Saturday morning, when I set out for the Bryn Mawr Farmers' Market, one of a number of marketplaces in the Farm to City network that celebrates local farmers and food artisans. (Farm to City markets can also be found in Rittenhouse Square, University Square, on East Passyunk, Girard, and Moyamensing, and in Havertown, Chestnut Hill, Swarthmore, among other places.) The temperature is a rare 70 degrees. The skies are blue. The air is breezy. The white tents in Bryn Mawr's Municipal Lot 7 have about them a carnival mood.

Read the whole story here, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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I have written here (and in Good Housekeeping) of my relationship to clay—tentative at best, inexpert, always.

I have written of my affection for the Wayne Art Center, and of the friends that I've made there.

But this afternoon I'm announcing something very special. Following nearly 30 years of marriage to an artist—architect, illustrator, photographer, 3-D image maker—my husband's work is, for the first time, going to be shared in an exhibition/sale.

Pottery has proven to be the perfect medium for Bill's many talents. He's asked me not to gush, and so I won't. I hope the pieces pictured above tell you at least some of the story, and if you're interested in seeing more—not just of Bill's work but of the incredible work of nearly three dozen clay artists— please join us at the Wayne Art Center, June 5 through June 8, more details here.

I'll be manning the table on Bill's behalf Thursday morning.

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I write four hundred words of the new novel—a seashore novel—and decide that I've earned a walk, down to the Devon Horse Show, where anticipation surrounding this evening's Grand Prix runs high.

Shortly after I return, a gift arrives—an absolutely gorgeous hardback history of Stone Harbor, which was "my" seashore during my growing up years and which has in recent times been returned to me by my brother, his wife, and his children. I wrote of my love for this place in one of my first stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and not long afterward, Amy Welsh, on behalf of the Stone Harbor Property Owners Association, wrote to ask if she might include the essay in the Stone Harbor centennial story.

Of course I said yes.

But I did not foresee just how lovely this book would be—the photos, the stories, the personal reminisces, the high-quality design and production. It is an honor to have my words included and an inspiration as I turn the corner on the halfway mark of this novel that still sits here, waiting for me.

Thank you, Stone Harbor, for being the shore I always loved best. And thank you, Amy, for ending your glorious book with my words.

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With gratitude, as always. I do know how lucky I am.

Additionally, my wonderful friend Karen Bernstein—she of gifts from Diane Keaton, she of brilliant Going Over pots—reports that she found Going Over on page 71 of the new issue of Main Line Today Magazine listed as one of the "ten great beach reads by local authors." Huge thanks to Karen, and to the magazine.

I have always loved being local.

Speaking of local: Come celebrate the first year in the life of Main Point Books next Saturday, when a fleet of super cool local authors will be signing books. I'll be there at three o'clock with both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. More on the day can be found here.

Finally, more on Going Over can be found here, through the hugely generous BCCB review.

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