Sally Abbott believes her role as a novelist was written before she was born. It started with her middle name: Abbott’s mother was so enamored of the renowned short-story writer Katherine Mansfield that she gave her second daughter the middle name “Mansfield.” To top it off, both Katherine and Sally were born in the same ...
Diane LeBow was a solo traveler when “one was an odd number for a woman traveler,” she has written. And she visited countries and people not on the typical tourist list: Libya, Morocco, Syria, Sulawesi, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan. She stayed from weeks to months, got to know the locals, and had romances with some. ...
When Don van Druten rumbled up to Kathy Bruin’s elementary school in his 1949 truck, she and some of the other fifth-graders piled into the truck’s bed, and off they’d go to his house on Lancaster Road in Walnut Creek. There, he would show them how to whittle wood and his wife, Gale, would teach ...
