31 October 2019

The Deep Roots of Willow Cove

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Next summer will bring The Witches of Willow Cove , a new novel for tweens by Josh Roberts, one of my writing group colleagues. Here are s...
23 October 2019

Raymie: “Everybody’s Kind of Movie”?

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I’ve been noodling out a story about kids in a seaside town, so I tracked down the 1960 movie Raymie for visual inspiration. Raymie ca...
1 comment:
14 October 2019

Casting Aspersions

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In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle , Hugh Lofting (in the voice of Tommy Stubbins, the shoemaker’s boy) described Dr. John Dolittle as “a l...
03 October 2019

Hard to Read

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One reason the Waukegan Public Library may have chosen not to portray native son Ray Bradbury as a little boy (as I discussed yesterday) i...
1 comment:
02 October 2019

Ray Bradbury’s Rocket

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I am not taken with the Ray Bradbury sculpture erected in his native town of Waukegan, Illinois, and unveiled this summer. Zachary Oxma...
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10 September 2019

Mid-Century Modern in the Emerald City

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After the original publisher of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz went bankrupt, Bobbs-Merrill became the book’s one and only US publisher. At...
02 September 2019

The Rise of the “Oxford Comma“

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A weekend Twitter conversation with editor Harold Underdown and picture book creator Debbie Ridpath Ohi set me digging for the origin of the...
29 August 2019

Thundering Herds

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The Thundering Herd was another Zane Grey novel made into a movie by Paramount, and then remade by the same studio with the young Randolp...
26 August 2019

Billy Lee: “one of the heaps magnificent young actor”

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Last week I mentioned Billy Lee, Hollywood child actor of the 1930s and early 1940s. I really can’t improve on the profile of him from t...
24 August 2019

The Journey from Fighting Caravans to Wagon Wheels

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In 1929 Zane Grey published The Fighting Caravans , a novel about a scout who leads wagon trains across Native American lands to the Orego...