Over the last few years, I’ve been branching more and more into grant writing. In October I worked on a large contract as a grant reviewer – not looking over grants before submission, but evaluating them after the fact. I was on a panel of other reviewers. We used a rubric of criteria to score submitted grants by numbers to give them rank and priority. We also made yes/no recommendations for funding. Here are some of the major takeaways from this rewarding experience.   Infor

Note: "Lovely" is an adjective and not an adverb. It modifies nouns, not verbs. Having engaged professionally with many types of writing,...

Warning: This blog post contains spoilers. I read Daffodils and Dog-Ears as part of the It’s True! Book Club at Viewpoint Books , and...

My copy of Borders Bridges Belonging among dewy Indiana sunflowers I bought my copy of Borders Bridges Belonging from my local bookstore...

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s a book I can turn to when I need comfort or a laugh—or validation of the complications...

A lot of the “rules” of writing are more flexible than some believe. Any given construct of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure,...

Spoilers ahead!  One of the things I love most about Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series is the Howl’s Moving Castle vibes. While Emily is unselfconsciously frumpy and bookish, unlike Sophie Hatter, she contrasts starkly against her flamboyant, outgoing, gorgeous counterpart. Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands, the second in the series, magnifies this effect all the more. This book features a search for a portal through the mountains, and their team of eerie and caricature-

Spoilers! Spoilerific, this one.  Let’s start with the spectacular: Bel’s character development - her progression from avoidant and...

Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez shares her heartbreaking testimony of what life was like when her parents were deported back to Mexico and...

Did you miss Independent Bookstore Day? It’s not too late to support an indie bookstore. Riddled with Ink is an online/pop-up bookstore...

The Magic of Books was started in the middle of the pandemic, a bold and inspiring endeavor that uplifted the small-town community of...

When I moved to Seymour in 2017, the nearest bookstore was half an hour away, and my favorites were at least an hour’s drive. Now I’m...

I started this blog with the intention of writing about things that inspire me, and Viewpoint Books fits the bill beautifully. You enter...

I like to read poetry in the mornings. I always like poetry, but it's such a great way to start the day - bearing witness to writers...

For Black History Month, I want to talk about "Black Roses" by Harold Green III. A lot of poetry overlaps with advocacy work – lifting...

If I have a "Roman Empire," something constantly and recurrently on my mind, it’s the Trail Companion produced by Indiana Humanities,...

The evening before the first snow back in November, I was in one of the gardens cutting corn straw for an outdoor cat enclosure when I...

I originally drafted this post in November.  We have a wild porch kitty. We’ve been calling her a porch cat because we don’t have a barn....

This book was in equal turns cozy and delightfully horrifying. It has a gradual ascent into the fantastical that is something I aspire to...

Look at this eight-spotted forester moth I caught sleepin' on our kitchen windowsill! It probably just hatched. The second yearly brood...