My longer essays, about issues important to me as a woman and a writer, are described here and linked to their full lengths on More Writer's Jottings on my Substack page. A number of them were written in the past, and others are underway, so stay tuned!

Once I had a chocolate brown cocker spaniel who came to live with me after I moved to a Connecticut village. She slept in a patch of warm sunshine in my writing room while I worked, and she bounced and sniffed her way along wooded trails with me when I hiked. Her tail-wagging friendliness wherever we went enabled me to meet my new neighbors. This is that story--and much more of it--along with a revelation about why I never got another dog. Read the entire essay here.

I first began to think about writing about childlessness as I approached the age of forty, a watershed birthday in regard to childbearing. When I explored the idea of femininity apart from maternity in my book, Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness, I realized that whether or not woman is a mother, every aspect of her being--her body, her sensuality, her sociability, and her relationship with nature--expresses her womanhood. This excerpt from the book explains why. Read the entire essay here.