On Writing

Movie poster of "Get Low" If I were teaching a writing class right now, I would require all my students to go see the new movie, Get Low, with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray and Lucas Black. Sure that's an all-star cast, but that's not the reason for my insistence. For those who study narrative drive, this movie is masterful in its storytelling. My writing guru, Sol Stein explains ...

Here is the review of Is it Night or Day? by the Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA), the library magazine servicing those who serve young adults: In 1938 Edith Westerfeld is twelve years old when her family puts her on a ship in Bremen,Germany that carries her to the Deutchland, an oceanliner that transports her to New York City. From there, all alone, she is put on a train to ...

Word of the Day August 28 To my delight, today's word-of-the-day from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is "veridical." veridicalvuh-RID-ih-kul adjective 1 : truthful, veracious 2 : not illusory : genuine What pleased me most is the sentence the dictionary used to showcase the word: "All psychotherapies are based on the fact that memory is not veridical, that unconscious desires and fantasies exert their force on us all..." (Henry Kaminer, Weekly Standard, ...

To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

Crumstadt, Germany My mother's cousin, Elisa Levi, recently sent this email after reading, Is It Night or Day?. When Elisa was a child, she and her family fled Crumstadt, Germany for Uruguay. My mother and Elisa have corresponded and visited each other since 1938, the year my mother left Germany. Dear Edith: I finished reading Fern's book. It made me relive all the sorrows and fears I experienced in Germany ...

My new web site showcasing my school presentations has gone live at AIVS (Authors and Illustrators who Visit Schools). Please visit: http://www.authorsillustrators.com/schumer_chapman/schumer_chapman.htm

In a dream last night, I stumbled upon an interesting image of my work. Each book I write is a footstep, marking where I am at that moment in my life. As American lawyer, orator, and memoirist Rufus Choate once said, "A book is the only immortality." Books are my way of announcing, "I was here." SLOW LOVE by Dominique Browning I suspect I came to this dream/thought because yesterday ...

The Sunday New York Times Book Review reports that, according to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24- year-old w0men and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today ...

French President Jacques Chirac Fifteen years ago, in July, 1995, French President Jacques Chirac gave a speech finally acknowledging the French role in the July 16, 1942 "Velodrome d'Hiver roundup." Here are his words: July 16 and 17, 1942, Paris, France "These black hours will stain our history forever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was supported by the ...

Profile of FSC (second from left) from Make It Better/North Shore Magazine It’s impossible for us to know who we truly are without knowing something of our mothers. That’s why Fern Schumer Chapman, a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Forbes, has spent years unraveling the enigma that is her mother, who was orphaned by the Holocaust. Fern’s first book, “Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim ...