Category: Books
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The F Words: Anglo-Saxon Origins
When I see high school students raising protest signs and chanting in support of their teachers, as in the strike (earlier this year) by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, I’m heartened. And when I see that the student chants are poetic in form (We ain’t shy./We ain’t timid./We are angry./We are livid.) I’m more than […]
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My Writing Life: 9
When the new century arrived, I was busy working on children’s books, both fiction and workbooks. The fiction consisted of two early readers, Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke (Houghton, 2005) and Waltur Paints Himself into a Corner (Houghton, 2006). Early readers, as I’ve written about before in “Early Readers: A Short Phase,” are […]
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The F Words: Following the F Words
It stands to reason that, before I sat down to write a YA novel titled The F Words — in which a teen who tags his high school wall with the F word is required to write two poems a week, each about a word that starts with the letter F — I would make […]
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My Writing Life: 8
In my previous blog I mentioned that researching Women at Play was an intense, four-year affair, and that it forever colored my attitude toward writing nonfiction. The nonfiction subjects I chose after Women at Play were individuals: Jack Graney on the one hand, Earl Derr Biggers on the other. Everything about Women at Play was […]
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The F Words: October Rules
In September of 2022 The F Words moved from a frontlist book to a backlist book. A publisher’s backlist consists of all the books it still carries that were published a year ago, or longer. Some books a publisher carries go out of print. Others stay in print forever, bringing in revenues to the publisher […]
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My Writing Life: 7
When I was a student at Kent State University I carried a double major: English and History. Anybody perusing my life in writing would think that I have employed only my knowledge of English and have disregarded my knowledge of History. But when it came to researching the hidden history of women in baseball and […]
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My Writing Life: 6
In 1977 Contemporary Books published my first novel, She’s on First. I’ve published a lot of books since, but you need not fear that I’m going to write a blog about each of them. That would take me to something like “My Writing Life: 147,” and I suspect I would lose many (if not all!) […]
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The F Words: Interview with Tamara Rolan, Book Reviewer
Two months ago a wonderful five-star review of The F Words appeared on GoodReads. After I shared this review on Facebook and Twitter, I learned that several people (who had somehow resisted buying The F Words up until this time) were so swayed by the review that they bought my book. Well, I thought: this […]
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My Writing Life: 5
The first year or two that I began to freelance as a writer, I looked for all kinds of writing and editing work (hence the refrigeration manual I blogged about earlier). Eventually, however, I gravitated toward writing mainly educational materials for grades K through 12, as I may have explained in a previous blog. In […]
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The F Words: Libraries
Libraries have played an important part in the development of my sense of justice and my social consciousness. In my teens I used to read books by Black authors of the Harlem Renaissance: writers like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen. Nobody assigned me these books. Nobody told me about them. […]
Barbara Gregorich 