Category: Nonfiction
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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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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: 4
Eventually I gave up my day job, knowing it would mean a decline in income, but an increase in opportunity to write and sell what I wrote. During my first three months of self-employment, I had grave concerns about my decision — mainly because I had said yes to a gigantic editing job for a […]
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Long Time Coming: Earl Derr Biggers Book
The things from my life that I turn into books are sometimes predictable, sometimes not. I always wanted to be a baseball player, so it makes sense to me that I turned that desire into a novel, She’s on First. And I worked in the typesetting department of a major newspaper, so it makes sense […]
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Women at Play: A Square Book
My first novel, She’s on First, was a baseball novel, published in 1987. After I spent 1987 promoting She’s on First, I decided I would write a true account of women in baseball. I started researching this subject in January of 1988 and figured I would finish by December. Wrong! It took me four years, […]
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Mountain Passes: Sitgreaves Pass
Sitgreaves Pass was named after Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves, a member of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the US Army. Prior to being given the assignment that led him through Sitgreaves Pass, he had worked on a wide variety of civil engineering duties. Among them: constructing roads in Wisconsin; surveying Sault St. Marie; surveying the […]
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Graphic Novels: Panels vs. Paragraphs
I grew up reading graphic novels, only they weren’t called that at the time. They were called comics, and what I read were the Classics Illustrated of the 1940s. I read them daytime and nighttime, indoors and out, over and over, until the pages had to be taped back to the covers. My two favorites […]
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Mountain Passes: Avalanche Pass
By the mid-1800s most of the important mountain passes in the West had been discovered and were being used for migration and transportation. Back East people were enjoying leisure time and looking to spend some of this time in the wilderness. This desire to know the wilderness wasn’t new. Almost from the first, the British […]
Barbara Gregorich 