 Red Room Writer Profile
|
|
Grant Hayter-Menzies's Blog
November 11, 2009
- I sat at the tea table of a woman born to an ancient princely family, in 1905, the year of the first Russian revolution, a woman who was still a child when, in 1917, another revolution smashed her young life to pieces. Mrs. D. served me tea in thin flowered cups and slices of cherry-filled pastry on thin flowered plates. I noticed a monogram in Cyrillic on a silver spoon—the first letter of ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
August 31, 2009
- It’s funny and wonderful how a fragile flower can summon up a flesh and blood person, just as palpably as if they, like the bloom, were capable of materializing in vivid color out of an unremarkable brown seed. I look at the cheery pinks, purples, whites and yellows of portulaca and my maternal grandmother is there with me—she grew them and they were the first flower she showed me how to ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
August 21, 2009
- I had a most interesting experience last week at the intersection of Fiction and Reality. I was in Salem, Massachusetts to look at Chinese art objects at the Peabody Essex Museum - research for my new book project. I had time to spare so I betook myself around Salem's harbour to the House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne's novel has been one of my favourites since childhood. I grew up in ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
August 20, 2009
- It's been something like two weeks since I "finished" the manuscript of my book, tentatively titled "True Friendship of a Foreign Lady: The Chinese Odyssey of Sarah Pike Conger." I use quotation marks because a wise writer is as superstitious as the parents of a Chinese baby: if you dress the boy as a girl, the evil spirits will leave him alone. But in all the basic ways, ...
- Continue Reading » 3 Comments
