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WEEK LINK: The Blue Bookshop Door

Every old "thing" has a story, but this antique-of-a-whole-other kind has its story written all over it...

In 1925, a popular bookstore in Greenwich Village closed, but before it did, the place was a hangout for the bohemian crowd that included literary lights of all kinds--flames and flickers--and the owner asked the "usual suspects" to sign a narrow blue door at the back of the shop.

Along with icons such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, the door records the "passage of forgotten poets, socialist pamphleteers, suffragists, Ziegfeld girls and multitasking oddballs," as the New York Times article put it. The door was removed by the manager and bought by the U. of Texas' famous Harry Ransom Center in 1960, after a dealer spotted an ad in the Saturday Review asking, “Want a door?” Where it was during all those years, who knows? But from 1960 to now, it had been forgotten until somebody stumbled across it in storage at the Center. You've got to love it. Everything has a story, even a blue door.

This week's New York Times Book Review section offered the article about The Blue Door from the 1920s as well as a slide show, both fascinating.  Read More 
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My Very First Web Interview




The nice writing gang behind "What Women Write" invited me over this month for my first web interview:


What Women Write BLOG-CLICK HERE:

"Lynda Rutledge stops by
to chat about her soon-to-be-released Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam novel Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale and the craft of writing." Read More 
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The Picture Window: My Ground Zero memory


New York City
10/11/2001



When I think about those days now, I see a dark street in some continuous midnight.
A man in a tuxedo carrying a cello from Carnegie Hall.
The sound of a sonata behind closed doors.
A Goya by a mansion's staircase, a Shakespeare folio under glass.
A flickering television in the apartment across from my 12th floor hotel window.
Only then, do I see why I was there and where I walked an entire November night—the gaping Ground Zero gash that was once the World Trade Center. The expected images have faded, mercifully if slowly, the images everyone knows without having to go there, the ones we'll always see. But the unexpected, what the mind chooses to hold on to and where the soul finds itself again, can be a lasting surprise.

I came to Manhattan a month after 9/11 to write a book with a crisis chaplain I'd never met. At 11:30 p.m., he walked into the hotel lobby in full blue tactical uniform, introduced himself, then led me immediately to the subway. Read More 
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LOOK (closely)

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Cherubs want to know

April 2012: Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale.
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