Interview with author Sandi Russell

Harlem-born jazz singer and writer Sandi Russell talks about her novel, COLOR, published this month    1.     What was the inspiration behind COLOR? When my parents retired, they moved from New York City to the area near Jamestown, Virginia, where my mother’s people had been living since before the arrival of the English settlers in the 17th Century. That area …

What writers can learn from the Olympic games

Despite all I feel about the cost of hosting the Olympic games in London this summer (siphoning funds that could, in my view, have been put to much better use), I have to confess to finding the dawn-to-dusk media coverage not only impossible to boycott, but also on occasion compelling. For example, women’s archery. Amazon-like contestants raise their bows, release …

Weaving

Earlier this month I visited the Gobelins in Paris, where tapestries and carpets are still made by hand using techniques that have hardly changed over centuries. After the history-for-tourists preamble by our guide we were taken on a tour of the workshops. There was something mesmeric about the row of weavers working with only the simplest of tools: a shuttle …