Three Wishes is the story of three best friends who transformed their lives by taking motherhood into their own hands. Carey, Beth, and Pam had succeeded at work but failed at romance, and each resolved to have a baby before time ran out. Just one problem: no men.

Carey took the first bold step towards single motherhood, searching anonymous donor banks until she found the perfect match. What she found was not a father in a vial, but a sort of magic potion. She met a man, fell in love, and got pregnant the old-fashioned way. She passed the vials to Beth, and it happened again. Beth met man, Beth got pregnant. Beth passed the vials to Pam, and the magic struck again. They had setbacks and disappointments, but three women became three families, reveling in the shared joy of love, friendship and never losing hope.

Why was Dewey written? Because I was asked to write it. Not just by one person, but by hundreds, for years. Locals, visitors, book agents, professional writers (they wanted to help), people who had read about him in magazines or seen him in a documentary. There was something magical about this lovable orange cat named Dewey Readmore Books and the small-town library where he lived. So, after years of saying no, I finally said yes. Dewey had recently died, and part of me must have known writing a book would keep him in my life.

A good library is less an institution than a home. 

Not that he could ever go away. I loved him for almost 20 years; everything in the library reminded me of him: the copier where he warmed himself, the front desk where he perched, the Western section where he hid, the book cart he used to ride on. Every morning, he sat at the door waiting for me. When he saw me coming, he'd wave. No matter how bad I felt, that wave made me believe the world was wonderful and everything would be all right. How could I ever forget that?

With the help of a writer (one finally got to me!), I started putting down on paper all those memories: how Dewey wouldn't come down from the overhead lights no matter how we begged, lounged in front of the heater until his fur was too hot to touch, slept in the box so the patrons couldn't get their tax forms, tortured us over his food and litter, enticed us to play hide-and-seek with him, attended every children's Story Hour, ran every meeting and generally turned a cold library into a warm, inviting, friendly place. I wrote about how he sought out those in need: the elderly man who had just lost his wife; an unemployed farmhand; the homeless man. I told how whenever I wanted to give up, because I was a single mother working full-time and going to school, Dewey sensed it and jumped on my lap. And how when I agonized over a double mastectomy or a less invasive treatment (I chose the mastectomy, but never told anyone until this book), he sat beside me while I cried. He was my best friend; he was always there for me. Always. I hope I've honored his life by capturing some of his magic.

I hope I've also captured something else: the magic of libraries. Libraries aren't warehouses for books; they are meeting houses for human beings. A good library is less an institution than a home. It has comfortable seats, desks, computers, friendly people and, yes, sometimes even a cat. Libraries are society's great leveling agent: they offer job listings, financial information, technology, entertainment, any book you want. For free. I hate it when people tiptoe through a library. "This isn't a graveyard," I want to shout. "It's alive. So live a little!"

Librarians aren't little old ladies who spend all day stamping books and shushing people. We love to have fun, for one thing. But we also have interesting jobs that entail, among other things, planning community events; adopting new technologies; battling censorship; and reaching out to underprivileged groups. We provide job banks in tough times, free childcare for working parents, and, in Spencer at least, translators for errands and doctors visits, the town's only Spanish-language outreach. Be warned: librarians are studying you, and they know what you need. That's their job.

I will never forget Dewey's friend Crystal, a severely mentally and physically handicapped girl so withdrawn that everyone thought she was dead inside. But Dewey sensed something, and he started following her wheelchair. Then he started climbing up and sitting on her wooden tray. She couldn't control her muscles, so she couldn't pet him, but she would squeal with delight. One day, I placed him inside her jacket. Dewey put his head on her chest and purred, and Crystal—she just exploded. She was alive with joy. That, to me, is a Dewey story; that's the kind of cat he was. And that's what libraries do. They change lives. Everywhere in this country. Every day.

I have been surprised by the reaction to Dewey. People love the portrayal of Iowa. They are awed by Spencer, a small town that has overcome adversity by pulling together and resisting simple answers (a slaughterhouse, a casino). I agree with them; I love Iowa and Spencer too, but I never thought this was a book about a place. I thought it was a book about an extraordinary cat, and the deep bond that developed between that cat and a woman, and how the two of them dedicated their lives to the last great free enterprise in American society: the library.

​Vicki Myron worked at the Spencer Public Library for 25 years, the last 20 years as its director. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, written with Bret Witter, is her account of the unforgettable cat who became a fixture at the library.

After years of being told to sit up straight, turn down the music and try, just try, to stop texting friends for a few waking moments, my pubescent son finally found a way to get even. He challenged me to climb a 14,000-foot mountain with him.

At his Colorado summer camp, my son Cass had tripped during a hike of Pikes Peak and slashed his shin to the bone. Strange thing was, he didn’t even care about the 10 surgical staples in his leg. All he talked about was the awe of watching the sunrise from the top of the same mountain that, more than a century earlier, had inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful.” Now he was inspired, too.

It was thrilling to see my 12-year-old so excited about something besides consumer electronics. It was terrifying to realize that he expected to repeat the experience with me.

I saw his request as proof that love was truly blind. After all, I was fat, 44 and in the market for a vasectomy. My mortgage was half-gone, but so was my hair. Jon Krakauer was something to read, not try.

Eons ago—back when my inseam had more inches than my waistline—I had hiked a few peaks. Then I got married, had three kids and started working to meet the responsibilities and obligations that came with the change of life. I liked to eat, not exercise. The best days of my body were so far behind me that there was no way I could ever get my behind up a mountain.

Then my son asked me, “Please?”

I could not resist.

Thus was born my book, Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled—and Knuckleheaded—Quest for the Rocky Mountain High. Cass and I tried and failed to summit another 14,000-foot mountain, but I came away grateful for the hours alone with a son far beyond the range of any cell phone, Xbox or Facebook account. I was hooked.
I learned my home state of Colorado has 54 peaks higher than 14,000 feet—more than any other state or province in North America. Every year more than 500,000 people try to climb a Fourteener, but fewer than 1,300 have ever reported standing atop them all. Colorado’s Fourteeners have been summited by skiers and snowboarders, racers and amputees, dogs, cats, cockatiels, monkeys and horses, people as young as one and as old as 81. One Texan spent three weeks pushing a peanut to the summit of one peak with his nose. There have been gunfights and cannibalism, avalanches and helicopter crashes.

Together the peaks have killed more climbers than Everest. They also were powerful enough to convince a stay-at-home dad with a pot belly that he had a chance to summit them all.

My wife of 17 years was generally supportive of my Fourteeners quest, but, worried about my safety, insisted on one big catch: I could never hike alone. Unfortunately, I knew no one who was remotely interested in joining me on climbs of more than four dozen 14,000-foot mountains in the three-month climbing season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I tried bribing friends, neighbors and friends of friends with free booze and car washes in exchange for their company on a mountain hike. No dice.

So I followed the lead of lonely and desperate people all over the world and sought help on the Internet. At a fledgling website, I found other people just as addicted to altitude. The result: several times a week, I would put the kids to bed, drive through the night to a wilderness trailhead, and sleep in a tent with a total stranger with hopes of summiting a peak the next day.

My man-dates turned out to be my favorite part of climbing the Fourteeners. I ended up hiking with, among others, an ex-drag racer trying to perform a handstand on the top of every Fourteener summit; the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band; a 21-year-old college student who survived a 400-foot fall that killed his father; a man so shaky around heights that he chain-smoked Marlboros on ridgetops to calm his nerves; a widower at age 38 who turned to hiking to ease his grief; and, best of all, my oldest son.

Along the way I learned about the gold rushes, hangings, wildlife and geology of one of the world’s great ranges, the Rocky Mountains. I lost 15 pounds but gained some wisdom. The best lesson of all, though, came when I discovered that age, like summit height, was just a number.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik lives in Denver with his family.

<B>Exploding the ‘Heroic Teacher’ myth</B> Everybody knows the story: brave, heroic teacher enters a tough school, faces seemingly insurmountable difficulties and finally earns both the distrust of the stuffed-shirt administrators and the trust of the tough-but-tender students. At the end, the unlikeliest of all the students gives a heartwarming speech and/or the students spontaneously break into song, and everybody cheers, sways to the music, and leaves with a tear in their eye and a lump in their throat.

It’s a pretty good story. The only problem is, it isn’t my story. My story, like the stories of most teachers, is a lot messier. Yes, I did start teaching in a tough school, and yes, I did encounter some heartwarming success, but I also encountered stomach-churning failure, and sometimes I failed at the exact thing I had succeeded at the day before. At the end of my first year, nobody made a heartwarming speech, but I did leave with a tear in my eye: I got laid off.

I got another teaching job, and once I reached the point where I was succeeding more than I failed with the students (this kicked in about year four), I had to wrestle with the question of how or why to continue doing this job year after year. The Heroic Teacher Myth never mentions this. Yes, the students inspired me, but some classes also drove me crazy. Yes, I worked with some wonderful, admirable people, but they were outnumbered by cranks and burnouts. Just when I found myself at a fork in the road, with one road leading out of teaching and the other leading to the Land of the Burnouts, I ducked the longevity problem by switching schools. And then I switched schools again, finally landing in an urban charter school, where, despite the fact that I was working really hard for embarrassingly low wages, I felt like I was finally home, like I had finally found the place where caring colleagues and a sensible administration would sustain me. After eight years of teaching, I felt like I had finally come to the end of the beginning of my teaching career. Having just sold my first book, <I>It Takes a Worried Man</I>, I thought I could now write a sort of counter to the Heroic Teacher Myth. I thought of it as The Lucky Teacher Story: the story of how a flawed but caring teacher could find happiness by eventually finding the right school. I started to write, but it was slow going. It was fun to remember some of the things that happened to me early on, but I didn’t feel much urgency about it, so I wrote irregularly.

Then, suddenly, the school where I worked got a new administration determined to remake the school in their own image and, in a stunning success, they transformed the school almost overnight into an ugly, unpleasant place.

This was horrible for me and my colleagues, but it ended up being good for the book. Suddenly, what had been something I wanted to do became something I <I>had</I> to do. The story became urgent. Writing this book was no longer about telling everyone how great I had it. Instead, it became about figuring out whether I was going to continue. I had to tell my story, not to supplant the Heroic Teacher Myth (probably a hopeless task anyway), but, rather, to figure out what the hell I was doing in this profession that kept breaking my heart. I quit my job at the charter school and spent the summer writing. Ultimately, after reviewing my entire career up to that point, I decided to keep teaching. My rationale feels embarrassingly sappy: in spite of the loss of my idealism, in spite of the transformation of my dream school into my nightmare school, in spite of everything that I complain about, I love working with my students too much to give it up. So maybe the whole lump-in-the-throat thing is not as artificial as I thought. I am, however, still waiting for the big, heartwarming speech from an unlikely student, or maybe for my class to serenade me with a few choruses of a touching song that causes everyone to link arms and sway.

Well, maybe next year. <I>Brendan Halpin’s new book,</I> Losing My Faculties: A Teacher’s Story<I>, chronicles the joys and challenges of his teaching career. An earlier memoir,</I> It Takes a Worried Man<I> (2002), depicted his wife’s struggle with breast cancer. Halpin lives in Boston with his wife and daughter and continues to teach high school English.</I>

About to turn 40 years old, I was having a serious midlife crisis. A novel I’d spent five years working on had been rejected, at the same time that my husband “Aaron” and I were going through infertility. I nicknamed this sad, vulnerable time-stretch my “no book, no baby summer.” Then I picked up the phone to hear the voice of Brad, an old college beau I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. He was currently a Harvard science professor with a 24-year-old graduate school girlfriend he could have 20 kids with. Worse, he had a new book coming out. Why did Brad get a book? He was a biology major. I’d been a struggling freelance writer in Manhattan for 20 years. I was enraged.

Instead of killing him, I offered to write a profile of Brad, turning my anxiety into a business opportunity. At our emotional lunch interview, I found myself less interested in his sociobiology book than with what had really happened between us in Ann Arbor, 20 years before. Without realizing it, I’d wound up conducting an exit interview. Focusing on my previous rejection took my mind off my current rejection. It was wildly cathartic. When two other exes called out of the blue, I got together with them and asked them the same questions. Before I married, from the ages of 13 to 35, I’d been madly in love five times, once every 4.4 years. I’d created a mythology in my head about why each of my old loves hadn’t lasted. One guy was a skirt chaser, another was too immature, a third had fallen for a more petite, successful woman. For each breakup, I’d blamed them. Now that I was a happily married, 40-year-old graduate of a dozen years of psychotherapy, my perspective had changed. Instead of being the victim, I pinpointed the moment where I’d screwed up each relationship. Having written countless personal essays on male-to-female issues for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane and New Woman, I suspected I was onto something. I scrawled down what happened when I’d reconnected with each beau and brought the early version into my writing workshop. The group’s members were usually critical about my rough drafts, offering such comments as, “That’s throat clearing. Throw out the first five pages and start over.” This time somebody said, “You should have gotten old and bitter a long time ago, ’cause this rocks.” Giving a reading at NYU, where I taught journalism, I nervously read the first chapter. When I was done, the audience roared. Then all the female undergraduates in the room mobbed me, telling me about their romantic disappointments. I realized what the next step was. I tracked down my other two major heartbreaks. My husband Aaron, a TV comedy writer, always hated when I wrote anything about him or our marriage. It was a problem since I preferred writing in first person and hated censoring myself. But here I could write about sex, drugs and rock and roll in past tense, so he couldn’t complain. There was only one problem. The workshop insisted that the tiny role of the muttering husband in the background be expanded. It seemed that the book I was writing in order not to write about my husband needed him as the hero. I feared the minute he read it, he’d divorce me.

The day after a wonderful editor at Delacorte bought my finished manuscript, I handed it to Aaron. He loved it, though he later joked to a friend that he was penning a rebuttal called The Bitch Beside Me. When I e-mailed Brad that I sold the book, he asked if he could see it. After he read it, his response was, “You’ve written a better character than I am a person.” The only people who don’t like it so far are my parents in Michigan. My mother said, “Go ahead, tell the whole world you’re in therapy.” My father is threatening to move to Alaska and keeps telling me how the sculpture of five male heads on the cover makes it seem like I cut the heads off. I told them that one of the benefits of publishing a book at my age is that I don’t really care if it’s not their cup of tea; they’re not my audience. “If you think turning 40 was hard, wait until you turn 50,” an older colleague recently warned.

Since I had the most fruitful midlife crisis in the history of the world, I can’t wait. Susan Shapiro’s heartbreaking and hilarious memoir, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, investigates the current lives of her past loves. A freelance writer, Shapiro lives in Manhattan with her husband.

I met the best friend I ever had when we were five years old, in kindergarten at Cassingham Elementary School in Bexley, Ohio. His name was Jack Roth, and the friendship lasted more than 50 years. Actually, when I say lasted, that’s past tense which means that it’s wrong. The friendship still lasts it still goes on, even though Jack is gone.

And that is the thought and the emotion behind And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship, and, I think, is the book’s most enduring lesson: Friendship is eternal friendship is the one thing that lasts forever.

There were five of us who were best friends in that town of 13,000 people: there was Jack, me, there was Chuck Shenk, Danny Dick, there was Allen Schulman. We called ourselves ABCDJ: Allen, Bob, Chuck, Dan, Jack.

We lived our nights at the Toddle House, solving problems after midnight over cheeseburgers, hash browns and banana cream pie; we cruised the quiet streets of our town, listening to the Beach Boys singing I Get Around, the Beatles singing She Loves You, when those songs, like us, were brand-new. As best friends will do, the five of us spent every waking hour together. And as best friends will do, we grew older, and moved to different towns, and saw each other less and less as the years went by.

Then the call came: Jack was dying.

We were 57 now, no longer kids. We had families and responsibilities and far-flung lives. But, as if by instinct, when we heard the news from Jack’s wife, we came together again, back in our hometown, to see him through to the end.

And You Know You Should Be Glad is the story of that last year how the boys from ABCDJ found each other again and rekindled the friendship, how we discovered anew just what a powerful and precious thing friendship is.

During that last year with Jack, in what you might think would have been difficult days and nights, we found laughter and warmth; during what you might think would be a time for only tears, we found hours full of the best of times and unforgettable moments. We revisited all the places that had meant so much to us when we were kids Jack wanted to taste his life, to give himself the gift of returning, with his friends, to the locations that had meant the most to him. We were with him every step of the way just as we had been when we all first were friends.

I’m told that the reason the book means what it does to people is that it’s the story of their own friendships, too. They see themselves in it. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has something like this in their lives this kind of friendship. It’s there, or it was, once upon a wondrous time.

When we were kids, we’d ride in Allen’s blue Ford on long summer afternoons and nights, windows open, radio blasting, Pretty Woman or House of the Rising Sun or Where Did Our Love Go playing on that radio, our arms reaching out the open windows and our hands, in unison, banging down against the metal roof of the car every time the Supremes sang the first syllable of baby : Ba-by, ba-by, where did our love go . . . . Those days and nights, we always thought, were the best times we’d ever find. But we were wrong. We found those times again, because of Jack. Against all odds, deep into our own lives, we became the boys in that blue Ford again. We found each other we found the wonderful times, we found the summer nights, we found the friendship.

It’s out there, that’s what we learned. The friendships that mean so much to us those first friendships that we think have drifted away and begun to disappear are waiting for us. That last year with Jack is something that will stay with us for the rest of our own lives. And what people tell me is that, after reading And You Know You Should Be Glad, they are picking up the phone and calling their own best friends.

You can find it again you can find that friendship. That was the last gift that Jack gave us: the understanding that friendship is the one thing that doesn’t die. It’s waiting for us. Best-selling author Bob Greene’s previous books include Duty, Once Upon a Town, Hang Time and Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents. He is also an award-winning journalist whose Chicago-based syndicated column ran for 31 years.

Writers write for only one reason: We have to. Because, honestly? This is a hell of a way to make a living; if doing it weren't a compulsion, I would have happily gone to law school, as my dad repeatedly suggested. I needed to write each of my books needed to, from the bottom of my soul but none more than this one. Writing Waiting for Daisy was a way to make sense of all that happened during my six-year quest to become a mother a time, as I tend to say, when I did everything I thought I'd never do in pursuit of something I wasn't even sure I wanted.

I didn't see anything like it in the stores: a book that, in a way that was both entertaining and true, addressed questions of whether to become a mother, of miscarriage, infertility and obsession. I'd received hundreds of letters and still receive them years later after publishing a piece in The New York Times Magazine on having a miscarriage in Japan. I'd broken a taboo by publicly discussing that experience; the gratitude readers expressed, and the stories they shared were both startling and heartrending. But even that wouldn't have been enough to get me to publish the details of my husband's sperm count. I also knew my story was, quite simply, a gripping yarn (hence the swashbuckling subtitle: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother ) and what writer can resist that? Here was an opportunity to stretch out, to use a more intimate, funnier voice than I could in my reported work a voice that was more like myself. It was also a chance to tell stories that I've always wanted to write about the people whom I encountered along the way: my first true love, who, with his wife, now has 15 kids (yes, 15, and yes, she gave birth to all of them). Or the so-called parasite single women whom I met in Tokyo. Their legendary shopping sprees were propping up their country's economy even as their refusal to marry or have kids was threatening to bring it down.

As a journalist, I've always been more engaged by ordinary lives than by the canoodling of celebrities, convinced that each of our stories has the potential to reveal a larger truth. I also felt that, if I was willing to put other women under the microscope I better be ready to turn the lens on myself. And truth? I thought writing a memoir would be easier than reporting: After all, I could do the whole thing without leaving my house. Plus, I'm not going to call myself and yell at me after the book is published for the way I described my hair. So I was surprised by how difficult I found the process, and not only because of the painful nature of the material. Writing about someone else, I have my notes, my transcripts, and that's it. Writing about myself, the material was as infinite as my memory. Culling it, creating the character of Peggy and carving my experience into a cohesive (I hope!) narrative was a daunting challenge. For about the first year, I mostly stared at my computer screen, played online Boggle and despaired of ever finding my way. It was my husband who helped me break through that block. He suggested I go to a therapist we knew, not so she could shrink my head (I'd had enough of that), but because she was trained to elicit a narrative of meaning from her clients. Perhaps if I recorded a few sessions, he said, I'd start to see my story's shape. It worked. I've been Boggle-free ever since. With Waiting for Daisy, I also hoped to weigh in on the latest cultural conversation about women's biological clocks, which I felt had gone badly off-track. Sure, it's harder for women to get (and stay) pregnant as we age, but I was furious over the new punitive media messages that reduced young women to their child-bearing potential, that warned them to marry Mr. Good Enough and back-burner their careers or miss out on having a child. I was equally irritated by the pathetic portrayal of professionally successful women who'd supposedly waited too long to have a baby. Someone needed to show what real life looks like for those of us struggling with these questions and pressures, to explore them without an agenda. Someone also needed to show the painful decisions and subtle manipulation that face millions of couples who enter infertility docs' offices. One in six couples will have difficulty having a baby; if that's not you, it's someone you know. But mostly, I wanted Waiting for Daisy to be a great story about being a woman in a confusing time, about trying to be true to yourself, trying to figure out the pieces of your life career, marriage, family in a way that works. And, if you're lucky, sometimes getting there.

Peggy Orenstein is a journalist, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an author whose previous books include Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, and Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World. She lives in the San Francisco area with her husband, Steven Okazaki, and their daughter, Daisy.

I once heard someone say that if you want to find out what you aren't going to be doing for the next 10 years, make a list of your goals. Then at least you'll know a few things that won't be happening. The point being that life is really about the detours, not the destinations. But I'm a planner. I make itineraries, lists. And, as I prepared to write my latest book, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat that I would pilot myself. Why this lunacy came to me is a much longer story indeed it is what The River Queen is about but I wanted to do this. In the 1920s my father lived along the banks of the Mississippi and I was raised on his river tales. I was going to visit the places my father knew. I would do the whole river over a period of about two months. After all, I'd written a proposal, a very exacting 57-page document, a testament to what I was going to do, and a very fine publisher had agreed to publish it.

Never mind that I knew little about boats, let alone locks and dams. I bought books. I learned nautical terms as if I were studying French. I studied the basics of hydraulic engineering until I knew more than anyone I know who isn't a hydraulic engineer. I understood, for example, exactly why the levee-only policy had been bad for New Orleans. But then in May, three months before I was to leave, my father died. He was almost 103 years old, so his death shouldn't have surprised anyone, but his mind was intact and I thought he'd just keep going.

I had a long grocery list of things I intended to ask him. What was the name of that island where you spent your summer? Tell me more about Klein's, the clothing store where you worked as a young man. Talk to me about the river when you were a boy. His death threw me into a depression I couldn't seem to snap out of. I had no desire to move, to travel, to go anywhere, let alone plan a huge trip. But I was committed and so I went up to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where my nephew lived and where I found two river pilots, charmingly named Tom and Jerry, who convinced me with great laughter and guffaws that it was impossible to go down the river in a houseboat alone. But Jerry had a boat he wanted to move south. They agreed to take me halfway and arranged for a friend to take me the rest.

Two weeks before I was to leave, Katrina happened. As I watched the horror unfold, which I don't think I need to describe here, my trip took a turn, a bend, I hadn't imagined. How could I sail in my boat all the way south? As I sailed with Tom and Jerry, it seemed I literally had to go with the flow. I had no idea how far this journey would take me. There was a tremendous sense of the unknown. My father's death meant he would not be telling me which island he'd visited or more about his time in Hannibal. But it also meant, in retrospect, that I was free to write about him in a way that I never could while he was alive. I did not anticipate this feeling, for I missed him terribly, but there were things left unsaid.

As the aftermath of Katrina unfolded and the price of gas soared, the whole venture to New Orleans was looking more and more moot. But I had things in my favor. Tom and Jerry were good guys, great guys actually, and, by a bit of luck, excellent river pilots, and they also immediately became great characters. I knew I wanted to stay with them and our wreck of a boat as we journeyed south. It wasn't long before I found myself standing on the bow of our boat, phoning my editor to tell him that I was throwing the well-wrought plan for my book out the window. Nothing that I'd exactly foreseen about this book was coming to be. And my editor replied that he didn't give a flying fattuty (or words to that effect) about the history of the locks and dams. Just tell me about your father, is what he said.

It was as if I had been banging my head against a wall and someone opened a door. I walked through a portal I hadn't seen and wrote the book I never anticipated writing. I began with the stories my father had told me, memories of his humor and his anger, moments I had never tapped into before. As I say in The River Queen, what began for me as an adventure and a lark turned into a journey into memory, childhood and the past. And it was definitely not what I had planned.

Acclaimed writer Mary Morris blends memoir and midlife journey in her latest book, The River Queen. The author of three travel books, six novels and three collections of short stories, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.