Our  Halloween poem comes from a time two centuries after the Scottish witches, below, were first evoked. Janet Little (1759–1813), known to her readers as “the Scotch milkmaid,” wrote in literary Scots, a northern dialect of English — as did her contemporary and mentor, Robert Burns (familiar to many from perhaps his best-known lyric, Auld [...]

My birthday in early October was not particularly noteworthy until I realized it was the day that my North Carolina driver’s license was to expire. For years, I renewed my license with simple traffic sign tests, paid the fee and left with a new picture of an older me, a colorful mug shot set on [...]

My friend Adam Dolle wrote me last week to let me know that his mother, Viola Dolle, had died after only a brief illness. Mrs. Dolle was a devout Catholic who traveled to Rome when she was 90 for an outdoor Christmas Eve Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II. She lived a long life [...]

The Constitution Center in Philadelphia, perhaps best known in recent years as the site of President Obama’s iconic speech on race, was packed this past Monday night. The two women onstage, Lynn Yeakel and Gail Collins — Yeakel, a Drexel University professor and the woman who challenged Senator Arlen Specter in 1992, and Collins, the [...]

1.  What are you working on now? I’m writing my second novel, Left Neglected. This is a story about a woman in her mid-thirties who is like so many women I know today—multi-tasking all day long, trying to be everything to everyone at work and at home, trying to succeed at everything, spread extremely thin. One [...]

We at WVFC were thrilled to discover an essential new resource and “neighbor” on the World Wide Web:  eCareDiary.com, an online community formed in late 2008 for those of us caring for elders in our families. In some ways, this is the challenge of our generation: balancing, sometimes, multiple dimensions of caregiving for several generations, [...]

This story about a rock star begins with a crumb bun. Well, a crumb muffin. I came down to breakfast this morning and there was a crumb muffin on the counter. Reader, I know you, like me, would never take a bite of that muffin, but that one big crumb on top that looked as [...]

Sometimes it feels as if all the buzz in literature, especially poetry, is about youth. Who won the Yale Younger Poets Award? The XYZ Fellowship for Writers Under Thirty? That’s only one of the reasons we’re thrilled for Lisa Russ Spaar, who nearly a decade after being nationally recognized as an “emerging writer” by the [...]

Some WVFC readers might remember a Nanette Lepore fashion catwalk we embedded last year for one of our Pat Allen’s posts; the very last dress in it, after all the signature Lepore pieces, was a T-shirt saying simply: SAVE THE GARMENT CENTER. It passed by so quickly, you might not have had time to ask: [...]

Eager to see what the Shriver Report has to say about women over 50, I paged through my electronic copy, wishing in my over-50 way that I had physical pages to flip and leaf through. But despite my failure to find any chapter or essay specifically dedicated to those of us who remember only too [...]