Linda K Sienkiewicz

Writing life, line by line

Flattened, Twisted, and Still Alive: The English Language

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The Beauty of a Battered Language: Finley Peter Dunne (1867 – 1936) once quipped, “When we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Nearly a century later, we’re still joyriding over words, backing up, running them down, and taking them for new spins. That's the charm of language. It evolves, adapts, reinvents itself with … [Read more...]

To Name or Not to Name: Writing Fiction in a Real Place

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When Fiction Meets a Real Place Anne Tyler amazes me with how she writes about real places, Baltimore, especially, and yet somehow makes them entirely her own. Her fictional neighborhoods feel familiar, but her corner stores and diners have names you’ve never heard before. You feel as if she’s built a parallel Baltimore just a few streets over from the real one. In my first novel, set near … [Read more...]

The Unexpected Comfort of a Spreadsheet: Trying New Things

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What We Resist Until We Don’t For years my husband has been extolling the virtues of spreadsheets. Whenever I felt overwhelmed with tasks, he’d calmly say, “Why don’t you make a spreadsheet?” I’d groan. To me, that was just one more task, one I didn’t quite know how to do, as simple as it seemed to my logical-thinking spouse. To be sure, I can accomplish quite a bit on the computer. I design … [Read more...]

Five Months to Release Date: A Magical Week in Ocracoke

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It’s five months before my novel’s release, and I’m freaking out a little bit. But visiting Ocracoke — the tiny Outer Banks village that became the setting for the story, and where my heart is— helped calm me. Between bookstore visits, literary connections, beach drives, breakfast at Pony Island, and the Firemen’s Ball, the week felt like a celebration not only of books, but of the island … [Read more...]

Looking at life through glasses, slightly smudged

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Nearly every photo of me past the age of eight tells a story in changing eyeglass fashion—just like the oversize frames above, which are weirdly coming back in style. I’ve spent most of my life in a quiet negotiation with the world—trying to see it clearly, trying to be seen clearly, and occasionally smudging both in the process. There’s a particular kind of childhood humiliation that comes … [Read more...]