Author Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout, courtesy of photographer Greta Rybus and The Guardian

I don’t claim to be a book reviewer but occasionally I’ll read something that I find so extraordinary that I want to tell about it on this blog. I just finished Amy and Isabelle, the first novel of Elizabeth Strout and this is a gem of a book! It explores the deep, complex relationship between mother and daughter in small town America. Although Strout's characters inhabit rural Maine, I think all of us mothers and daughters will find something familiar, touching, poignant and human in this universal story. She tells it with such grace and sensitivity. Strout is a master at human relationships and she has the uncanny ability of acute observation--noticing the smallest simple gestures of every day life and turning the mundane into such a profound picture of human emotion.

"With a plain voice and a bountiful spirit, Strout paints a full array of emotion from despair to delight on a small canvas...Strout makes these souls real. They are our townspeople, and we are theirs." --O: The Oprah Magazine

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"Strout crawls so far into her characters you feel you inhabit them..."
USA Today

Amy and Isabelle won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England.

2 Songs for Our Times

Good Old Leonard Cohen telling it like it is
Everybody Knows

THe Makepeace Brothers
Hero
"This is the kind of hero we need: noble, wise, human, kind"

Things To Do

One of our most useful tools right now is boycotting. Boycott all advertisers on Fox--as long as they exist spreading lies we don't have a chance. Boycott companies who donated to the current administration.

A boycott is an act of nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organization, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for moral, social, political, or environmental reasons. The purpose of a boycott is to inflict some economic loss on the target, or to indicate a moral outrage, usually to try to compel the target to alter an objectionable behavior. The word is named after Captain Charles Boycott, agent of an absentee landlord in Ireland, against whom the tactic was successfully employed after a suggestion by Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Land League in 1880.

The NAACP wants Americans to steer their buying power toward companies that haven’t pulled back from diversity, equity and inclusion programs under conservative pressure, and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is listing which brands have stood by — or reversed — past commitments to DEI. Here is more information on their spending guide. The advisory praises Costco for standing by previous commitments, as well as Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Delta Airlines, e.l.f. Cosmetics and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Painting of the Week

Music is Life 82” x 56” mixed media on canvas

Charity of the Week: American Civil Liberties Union

About The Author

New York City based contemporary artist, Pam Smilow, began writing the creative lifestyle blog “things we love” in an effort to foster a sense of community during times of isolation and reflection. To read more about her and her art, visit her website and check out the essay written by Frank Matheis entitled The Sophisticated Innocence of Pam Smilow.