My grandmother wrote a letter to each of her children almost every day, even when nearly every American home had a telephone. She talked about mundane things and ended with the pronouncement that she was writing “just to let you know that I am still alive.” In May and…
When I finished high school, I wanted to be a hobo, traveling from one interesting place to another, picking up work to finance my adventures, hitchhiking, hopping freight trains, and sleeping by the road. The first obstacle was that I was not quite eighteen and no one would hire me. The second obstacle…
I was a little girl who loved to read. My favorites were biographies and historical fiction. I pretended to be a writer like Louisa May Alcott . I hid my work under my pillow and when my mother found it, she read it aloud in front of my brothers. They all laughed. That was…
AMY FRADEL 