Dear Readers:
Thanks for coming to my website. I hope spend some time here checking out stuff I've written and reading excerpts from my books for kids––
Slipping and Little Blog on the Prairie.
Cheers, Cathleen
Princeton Book Festival -- Saturday Sept 10th
September 8, 2011
If you live in the Princeton, NJ area come see me this Saturday: I will have a Little Blog on the Prairie table at the Princeton Public Library’s book fair 11am-4pm.
Where I’ll teach any and all how to make butter.
And where I will not wear a bonnet.
(I’m not kidding about either of those things.)
For more info on the festival, go to: www.princeton.lib.nj.us/children/festival/index.html
story
February 17, 2011
In graduate school, I was trained (sort of) to write short stories. I didn’t read short stories, except in the New Yorker because it’s always lying around the house, and I was always confused by the idea of writing in this form––just as you get to know a character, the story is over. But occasionally, a story will come into my brain whole. It’s best when it’s an idea that’s like a truffle, intense, awesome but something you can’t imagine having a lot of. (Maybe the truffle comparison breaks down here. I can eat a lot of truffles.)
Anyway, I have a story idea in my mind right now, and as I’m waiting a few days to hear back from an editor on an idea I want to turn into my next book, I think I might just take a crack at it. Here’s what I’m thinking will be the opening line:
Ally, Jennifer, Kate and I were the only mothers in Classroom K-203 who took the subway into work after drop off. We started the kindergarten year bumping into one another on the platform, then waiting up when we’d see the other on the sidewalk outside school. Pretty soon we’d become a group. Except for Thursdays when Ally’s husband dropped off so she could get in early for a staff meeting, we’d meet up in the hall outside the classroom, walk together the two blocks to the F train, and talk the whole way into the city, hanging onto poles and straps as the F train labored from stop to stop, hestitating and jerking its way up ramps, into tunnels and faster and faster toward midtown where we all, the four of us, and sometimes we felt like we were the only ones––had jobs.
We talked and listened. This was before any of us had had coffee, but still, these conversations were wild, as if our lives depended on it.
….
Okay! Here I go…
Feburary Bloom
February 15, 2011
This apostle plant blooms in my window at this time of year––my wedding anniversary, my daughter’s birth, Valentine’s Day.
This plant is a descendant––a cutting of a cutting of a cutting––of one that belonged to my great grandmother. Between second and sixth grades, my mother, sister and I lived in a tiny, crumbling half-a-house in downtown Princeton. It had no shower, only a claw foot tub in the tiny bathroom. My mom filled a shelf at the faucet end of the tub with a row of these plants and the stiff leaves used to rub my feet when I ducked under to rinse my hair. Terrifying. Never noticed seeing a single one bloom. But as an adult, here they are, with these gorgeous and fleeting flowers. I photograph them every time they bloom as if it’s possible to hold on.
