Bubble & Squeek for 8 July 2019

I’ve known Loren Rhoads for years online and I don’t know if I’ve ever told her that cemeteries fascinate me. Today, she tells me how she fell in love with this macabre subject. The first time I visited a cemetery on vacation was an accident. I’d discovered a lovely book of cemetery photos — who knew such a thing existed? — in the bookshop at London’s Victoria Station. My husband Mason decided he would rather see beautiful, overgrown Highgate Cemetery than the Tower of London. Once we were there, surrounded by angels clothed in ivy, I fell in love with cemetery statuary. One of my friends in San Francisco recommended I stop by the Rand McNally store and pick up a cemetery guidebook (my first!) called Permanent Parisians. At her suggestion, we’d already planned to work Pere Lachaise Cemetery into our trip to Paris, because Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and...

I’m about to run off to the Rainforest Village Writers Retreat this weekend (Twitter: #RWVR). I will be speaking on panels and writing like crazy the rest of the time. I have an ambitious list to get through. We will see how it goes. I really enjoy writing retreats. Weirdly, they are a vacation from my fulltime freelance writer’s life. Yes, I’m doing the same thing I do most days but I’m doing it in a different environment without all of the demands of home – husband, cats, chores, weekly obligations. Instead, I’m writing and hanging out with other writers; many of whom I usually don’t get to see. There is something invigorating about all that. In July, I’ll be speaking at the Cascade Writers Workshop. I’ll be doing a lot more talking and attending other panels than writing but, like Rainforest, I’ll still be around a whole lot of...