What is it about historical fiction that you enjoy writing?
I like interpreting a story or a life and seeing what it means. When I went to college at [SUNY] Potsdam to be a musician and that didn't really pan out, I had to declare a major, so I declared in history. I'm just fascinated by history. I'm just staggered when I think about what it could be like before all of this that we've grown up with and all of this chaos and machines and noise and everything when it was wild and dangerous. It's just great to imagine what it could have been like. It's very exciting for me.
If you had the chance to have a drink with Frank Lloyd Wright or Alfred Kinsey, who would it be?
Well, Kinsey would only want to take my sex survey, so I'd rather go with Wright and talk about art. I know he would be really pompous and he would lecture on and on, but it would be about something I really want to know about. Not that I don't want to know about the sex! But I think Dr. Kinsey would be so stiff about it, and he most likely wouldn't want a drink in the first place.
Related:
Simple gifts, Meet the Kleenex Designers, Drawing connections, More 
- Simple gifts
Charles and Henry Greene came to Boston in 1888 to study architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Meet the Kleenex Designers
They'll rub your nose in it
- Drawing connections
The Portland Museum of Art’s challenge in presenting an architectural exhibition is akin to the finger that points to the moon.
- From sketch to finish
Visit the top floor of the Portland Museum of Art for a local contribution to the design discussion.
- States of the art
In New England, where you can't swing a sack of cranberries without hitting a venerable cultural institution, anyone with access to a car (or even a subway pass) can scope out these topnotch art museums.
- Performance/Art
The twain rarely meet, it seems, when it comes to First Fridays versus opening nights in the Portland theaters. We have our gallery scene, our theater scene, and our music scene, but for the most part, the city’s various arts scenesters tend to stay comfortably within their own disciplines. But why languish in this separate-but-equal sensibility, when we might have rapprochement, integration, even brazen conjugality?
- Hearts of glass
In the photo it is night, and two women in cocktail dresses sit — perhaps chatting while jazz plays in the background — in a spare modern living room.
- ...And the living is easy
Fellow Portlanders, we have about three months until we return to our caves for hibernation.
- Greatest hits
The RISD Museum continues its top to bottom renovation and expansion.
- More sex, more Lincoln
The subject of Lincoln is like catnip to publishers (and readers), but the only things missing from our winter list are actual cat books.
- Built to move
The Institute of Contemporary Art, clearly in a nomadic frame of mind as it gears up for its own move to a new building on the Boston waterfront next fall, looks at the surprisingly long history of adaptability in domestic design.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Visual Arts, Architecture, Design, More
, Visual Arts, Architecture, Design, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, University of Southern California, State University of New York System, Cassandra Landry, Harvard Coop, THE WOMEN, Less
