Jennifer Howard

I’ve been scribbling some notes for a YA story set in Washington, D.C.—not the D.C. of power and political theater but the city I know as a resident. When I say “scribbling” I really mean scribbling, with a pen, in an actual notebook (a “legendary” notebook, of all things). It’s too early to say whether this project will benefit from beginning life as hand-scrawled notes rather than as an orderly word-processing document, but I have some hopes that the jotting will jog loose some ideas. It’s good to have a home for stray phrases and fragments that present themselves. A… Read more...

What makes a story you loved as a kid stick in your mind years and decades after you encountered it? That question animates Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book, which I’m reading now. Miller, a writer and critic for Salon, revisits her childhood passion for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and tries to sort out what made her fall in love with Narnia as an 8-year-old and how her feelings changed as she grew into a more sophisticated, more ambivalent reader. (Christian symbolism? Ack!) As her website says, “The Magician’s Book is the story of one reader’s long, tumultuous relationship with… Read more...

A report on my personal and so far successful campaign to get organized. If you’re of a certain age or you’ve studied the Reagan era, the name Fawn Hall will mean something to you. As Oliver North’s secretary, she shredded documents related to the Iran-contra affair. She also had memorable hair and was fined for eating a banana in DC’s Metro, but that’s neither here not there. Fawn Hall has been on my mind lately as I’ve held a shredding party of my own. I consulted some of the excellent Lifehacker’s tips on how to tame the filing beast. I… Read more...