The Assay Interview Project: Justin Martin
April 1, 2025

Justin Martin writes meticulously researched biographies and historical works.  In addition to Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted—the subject of this interview–Martin’s other books include A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery and Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (Victoria Society NY, outstanding biography 2014; Marfield Prize finalist). Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, and Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (New York Times Book Review Notable Book 2001) were preceded by several years as a staff writer at Fortune magazine. Martin’s articles have been published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.  He is a 1987 graduate of Rice University.
About Genius of Place:  Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here. Most of all, he was a social reformer. He didn't simply create places that were beautiful in the abstract. An awesome and timeless intent stands behind Olmsted's designs, allowing his work to survive to the present day. With our urgent need to revitalize cities and a widespread yearning for green space, his work is more relevant now than it was during his lifetime. Justin Martin restores Olmsted to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans.
Lynn Z. Bloom: As a writer, what attracted you to biography?

Justin Martin: The simple arc of a biography attracted me.  It’s one of the simplest stories on earth because it’s a person’s tale, with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end.  In what’s known as a cradle to the grave biography, or, if the person is living, cradle to the current time as in my biography of Ralph Nader, you’re looking at a single person, telling their story.  There’s an elegant simplicity to it.

Do you think that the biographer imposes elegant simplicity or is it inherent in the narrative?  

The biographer imposes elegance. My wife and I always joke that if we have two facts about someone we will connect them, although any person is more complicated than that.  A good biography, you hope, is complex the way people are and it captures many facets of a person’s life.  If it incorporated everything, all of the complexity, it would probably be incoherent—a hot mess.  If you go to a party and see someone you might think that’s the way that person always responds, but that’s not true.  People think Abraham Lincoln had a sterling character because there are biographical details that bear that out, and that’s what we want to believe.  But that doesn’t include lots of other complicating information.   

Somebody once tried to write a complete record of his every thought for a twenty-four hour period, but he couldn’t do it.  He could never get everything down, and what he did say was totally boring, and very hard to follow.

I’ve been asked what I’d do if I had complete access to the mental processes of an individual.  The volume would be so overwhelming and  incoherent.  The elegant simplicity of the biographical arc is very satisfying to the writer—themes that can be teased out, character that can emerge.

How did you learn to write a biography?  Any models for Genius of Place?

In my 20s I wrote a failed novel, but it was an invaluable experience. It gave me an idea of how to write something in long form. So that even though my novel was unsuccessful—I wasn’t able to sell it—it gave me practice in writing something that was three hundred pages long.

I should mention that I’m a marathon runner, I’ve run seven marathons. My first time ever was the worst, my time was the longest. I didn’t understand how to do it, how to do the pacing. when to turn it on, when to turn it off.  And in subsequent marathons I got better. That novel was a happy experience because of the practice those three hundred pages provided.

Another happy experience was my work at Fortune magazine.  An editor, John Huey, came in during the middle of my tenure at the magazine. His advice stuck with me and probably with a lot of my colleagues too.  He said I do not want to have a story of General Motors succeeding or failing; I want to see it through the prism of an executive’s vision.  General Motors should not be an impersonal story, it’s a human story; that vision may be ill-conceived, people may be frustrated or angry. They probably have allies and advocates within the company who support them, and others who are very angry and want to see this person deposed. Those are the exciting human dramas.  From that I learned how to see the human drama side of the story.

It's very clear to me from reading Genius of Place that you see your subject in dramatic terms.

 I subscribe to the “great man/person” theory of biography. I think the right way to view history is through the lens of people, through individuals, whether famous or anonymous. A Fierce Glory, my book on the Battle of Antietam, focused on the foot soldiers. My working model was Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic. Lord included lots of people, lots of points of view, pithy sentences with a moral dimension.  Someone was selfish and rude; he fell out of the raft and drowned.  Someone else was brave and survived the disaster. I tried to do this with Antietam—tales of cowardice and valor.

Why did you decide to write about Olmsted?  What was your initial attitude toward him?  Did this change over time?  Who’s your audience?

I decided to write about Olmsted because I kept having brushes with him, first while living in Manhattan, near Central Park, and later when I moved to Forest Hills Gardens, a neighborhood in Queens designed by his son. Olmsted kept following me, I like to joke. My first brushes with him were obviously as a landscape artist, a vivid subject who was interested in everything he did. There are so many figures who weren’t fully formed as youths, or who settled into sameness or who lose their edge after they’ve attained greatness, after they’ve written their great symphony, fought their great battle.  Olmsted was interesting throughout his whole life, full of insatiable curiosity and original observations.  He was a very very passionate, committed person even when he was going off half cocked.  For instance, when he was twenty one he insisted on signing onto a merchant ship bound for China as an utterly inexperienced sailor; he nearly died of seasickness, starvation, and overwork.  But he developed an inner strength and survived.

When in your writing did you decide on the perfect beautifully ambiguous title, Genius of Place?

It’s my favorite title.  Every book I’ve ever sold has had a placeholder title for a work in progress. You use the title to sell the book to the editor and the editor’s colleagues in the marketing department.  I’ve used many placeholder titles.  They have to be OK but the presumption is that you’ll come up with a better title before the book is published.

The working title was Central, a pun on Central Park, and the fact that Olmsted was central to his times. The very last sentence of my book includes the word “central,” resonant of that fact. I made a mistake, which hastened finding the right title.  I said “What about American Visionary”?  My editor said, “that’s not bad,” but when I thought about it I decided “Yes, that’s bad.”  It was very generic, I didn’t like it. There have been a lot of American visionaries and a lot of biographies of American visionaries. In fact, Fred Kaplan had recently written John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.

Then I was under the gun. I had two days to come up with the right title. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning. After brainstorming I came up with The Genius of Place.  It was wonderfully ambiguous. Genius loci refers, of course, to the distinctive spirit of a place.   I’m not into the idea of people being geniuses but with Olmsted it worked.  It was necessary to convince readers that my subject was in fact a genius. My editor immediately recognized it as a good title, infinitely superior to the earlier title.  She made one change, dropping the The, which I thought was a very nice change.  Among other things the title retains the concept of the hallowed landscape.

I’ve had this experience five times, coming up with a title to replace a placeholder title.  I’ve won some and I’ve lost some. This is one of the happier outcomes.
 
You said that you wrote the Central Park chapter first, even though you knew that the book would proceed chronologically.  How did you decide to do that?  Do you often start in the middle of the narrative? How did writing this initial chapter influence your writing of the rest of the book?

I actually started writing the book on the middle two topics, Central Park and Olmsted’s Civil War service.  I wanted to get down the solid core of the life first while I had a lot of energy.  Central Park is Olmsted’s masterpiece. The Civil War was a national crisis that resonated with a lot of the themes of Olmsted’s life; his values, opposing slavery as an institution and his role as an advocate for democracy.  This was a good decision because  I had an intuition that everything in his youth was flowing toward these great moments of service in the Civil War, and  toward his professional development when he designed Central Park. Everything for the rest of his life flowed outward from these.

I wrote these sections first.  And then as I continued the research I thought, “Oh, there are themes that I want to make pop more, or something I didn’t understand about his youth until I learned more." I always like to think of a book manuscript as a living document, so it makes sense to go back through the book and alter chapters. I was returning to those chapters and making tweaks and amendments to incorporate material that I’d learned as I was writing, moving some material into earlier chapters, some into later ones to make the narrative have a nicer, neater arc. 

I haven’t written another book in this fashion, although I’d be happy to do so.  I have colleagues who have written books starting at the end.  This makes eminent sense to me, to write the last chapter first.  I’d be open to starting anywhere in the book if it made logical sense.

Did you do the research on these two chapters first?  Or did you have a lot of research about his earlier life in place before you came to these sections.

I did the research on the Civil War section first, then wrote the section. Then I did the research on Central Park, which actually preceded the Civil War section, so research then write. The ultimate rookie mistake—everyone has this fantasy—is that you do all your research first, maybe during a sabbatical year, and then you sit down and write the entire book.  Thankfully, it’s a mistake I never made. 

I wanted to do the research for a chapter and then write because the material would be fresh. A research mistake is to go too deep on one area or subject that may not pan out.  You want the holes you’re digging during the research to be shallow and broad, not too deep. You would make a terrible mistake if you dug one hole all the way to China and didn’t dig any other holes; you’d be neglecting other topics.

If you write when you have the information on just one part you are then able to see what’s missing and then fill in the blanks with additional focused research.  You can return to different sections and revise them as necessary, but if you waited to do this until the end of a long research period it would be a real mess because you’d have too much information that would either duplicate what you have or be irrelevant.  You can find the stuff you didn’t know about before.  Research, then write; research then write; that allows you to really grow into your subject.  As you’re writing you start to learn efficiencies in your writing process so you’ll focus on finding the stuff that you didn’t know.

Your process appears to be guaranteed to get something written in a manageable time.

I quickly found a formula to use in deciding how deeply I needed to research any given park so that I wouldn’t incorporate too much irrelevant information. For example, it's important for a reader to understand Olmsted's over-arching vision for the Buffalo Park system. I used a baseball-field analogy.  “Think of Niagara Square as home plate. Think of the parks as being placed in left field (the Front), center field (the Park), and right field (the Parade).” But if I'd delved into Olmsted's design of every pathway, every meadow, in that park system, it would be overwhelming for readers. I'd have been losing the forest for the trees, literally.

How much do you think your audience understands about your subject?  You don’t want to tell them what they already know.  How do you decide what they know?

People such as Lincoln and U.S. Grant  have had so many biographies written about them, it’s satisfying to tell these well-known stories. I tried to anticipate what readers already knew to keep the work really interesting. My father, a philosophy professor, read two U.S. Grant biographies in a row.  I asked him why he did it and he said, “I like those stories.”  If you make the known stories rich and deep people savor these details and look forward to hearing the stories again.  If you write a boring biography of Abraham Lincoln people will start saying, “Oh, we knew all that stuff.”  But if you make the familiar episodes rich and vibrant you won’t come up against the charges that it’s boring.

I would guess that some percentage of my readers are extremely knowledgeable about Olmsted; and hopefully they are simply entertained and happy to hear the stories again. 

Did you realize at the outset how many different disciplines/topics/activities you’d need to understand (if not to master) to do justice to Olmsted’s diverse, wide-ranging endeavors?  These include 19th century US history–political, military, economic, and social; nursing and medicine; city planning; politics; child rearing practices and family dynamics; landscape architecture; environmentalism and conservation; national parks; schools and universities–Stanford in particular. 

That I needed to have such vast knowledge did scare me.  When I got the contract my wife and I decided to go to Amish country in Pennsylvania to celebrate. My celebration lasted through our initial Friday night dinner.  I woke up bolt upright at 2 am. “What did I get myself into?”   This was 2009.  At that time people didn’t take laptops with them and their phones weren’t little computers.  The TV in our hotel room was the only thing with an Internet browsing feature, you had to pay for it. I got on the Internet and started searching on various Olmsted topics to see what was out there.  I was satisfied that there was a lot of material, but as any sensible person would be when embarking on a big topic, I was intimidated. I felt I’d gotten in over my head. Throughout the project, when I’ve had to tackle a new subject, such as sailing to China, or 19th century farming (when he was 28-32, Olmsted practiced scientific farming in Connecticut and on Staten Island) I had to get myself grounded in all these new topics. 

One of the things that prepared me to write Genius of Place came from one of my first gigs at Fortune, writing News Trends—six small articles on diverse topics written simultaneously, a couple paragraphs each. One might be on the gold market, one on electric cars, another on the viability of nuclear energy, another on the bond market. I would have to know a lot about each. It was almost like being in the Emergency Room.  I would have all of these stories coming at me simultaneously. People I had contacted would be calling me back about one topic after another.  This was stressful at the time but really good practice in learning how to juggle a variety of disparate subjects simultaneously.

How did you know where to look for the sources that you had to consult for Olmsted?  Did you know about these resources before you wrote your proposal to the publishers? 

I was aware of them but I didn’t know how valuable they would be—whether I would find them valuable and want to consult them, or not.  They turned out to be invaluable, the keys to the kingdom.

I was standing on the shoulders of my predecessors’ unbelievable work.   I wouldn’t have been able to write this book in twenty years or even two hundred years without the research of Laura Wood Roper in the 1950s-60s and Charles Beveridge, research giants.   Their research provided a nicely wrapped package of letters all tied in a bow.

Roper published FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted in 1973. She spent years researching, writing to people involved in Olmsted’s work: “Your grandfather, I’ve become aware, worked with Olmsted in the Milwaukee Park System.  Would you have any letters or other information that you could share with me?”  People would reply, “I’ve found this dusty cache of letters in the attic.  Would these be of any use to you?” These moldering letters in people’s attics had become family lore.   Her papers are in the Library of Congress.  She rescued Olmsted from anonymity or at least, not having the story be as vivid and as rich as it became because of this research. 

Charles Beveridge, a preservationist and preeminent Olmsted researcher, prepared eleven annotated volumes of Olmsted’s collected letters.  Annotations are essential. But not all of Olmsted’s letters are there.  I found new letters in other collections;  I learned my way around the New York Public Library, the Harvard Design Library, and the Library of Congress.  I had enough background in place so I knew where to look for more information.

I was aware of these repositories but didn’t know them intimately.  Candace Millard, my friend who’s written about Garfield (among other topics), says write about someone about whom too much is known.  This makes it possible to do what I did, an act of condensation rather than expansion. This is much more pleasant than working from too little information.

So much is known about Olmsted that in condensing the information it’s possible to focus in a lot of different ways, paring it down to focus on an author's particular interests.  I chose to write a general book. Someone else could write a very different book on, say, the Emerald Necklace.  Or a much more trade-oriented book that’s meant for landscape architects.

There was so much information that I made what I consider surgical strikes–or maybe unsurgical strikes.  At the Library of Congress I would request a roll of microfilm.  I would read randomly.  At the end of the day four or five letters would turn out to be amazing.  They hadn’t been annotated in Beveridge’s collection and hadn’t been seen anywhere else. Sometimes they’d be very mundane—“I’m doing all right.”—but at other times I’d find letters that were very revelatory.  This was a lot of fun.  Olmsted would write notes in the margin, draw little pictures; these brought him to life.

Instead of scaring you off, Genius of Place demonstrates that you not only understand all these topics, but that you can present complicated--even arcane—information with clarity and zest.  What principles govern your writing?

One principle: for a general audience, keep it interesting.  If you know a lot about a person you’re able to keep it interesting. I remember once reading in the New York Times about a biography of a 19th century industrialist, where the reviewer said: “The author devoted 120 pages to a railroad merger.  It was very boring and very confusing, but I guess that’s the way it happened.” I found this a very strange comment coming from a reviewer. You don’t want it to be either confusing or boring. It was the author’s choice to make this discussion very long; if it’s boring that’s a consequence of that choice.  That author has abdicated his responsibility; it’s up to the author to decide the proportioning.  The biographer has the mandate to decide what’s interesting.  Maybe you leave this particular episode out altogether, maybe you give it a paragraph; or maybe you cover it in twelve pages instead of 120 pages. Or if you’ve discovered the most fascinating railroad merger ever, maybe you give it a thousand pages.  What justifies the emphasis and the length of anything is the author’s decision.

What were the most difficult aspects of writing Genius of Place?  The easiest?

Most difficult are the holes.  Black holes, where you have very little information about your subject, are the bane of a biographer’s existence. I was in a biography group for about a decade.  When we’d get together the biggest subject was “How do you fill in the holes, the gaps in research?”  It requires some trickery, some artifice, to write around a hole.  

Olmsted's story has its share of black holes.  There are sections of his life where not much is known.  Olmsted had a depression in the 1870s and retreated into a darkened room.  He fell off the earth for a few weeks.  Not much is known about this.  The same is true about his life in McLean Sanitarium, as a patient with Alzheimer’s or some other kind of senile dementia.  It would help to have had a transcript of his fevered mind.  But it’s also pretty challenging to have just a few facts.

 I covered these last five years of Olmsted’s life in a single page.  I had only a few facts from those five years, whereas in some other sections there was lots of information.  McLean wouldn’t disclose information about patients.  They refused to acknowledge that Olmsted was even there, or Sylvia Plath, although they were kind of wink-wink about it.  If I’d had letters from his son or wife these would have added more grist. 

That final chapter shouldn’t have been too long. It would have been a sad chapter with a lot of clinical detail, and probably a lot of repetition.  This man who had written so many letters, built so many parks, done so much, faded out. The biographer’s artifice is in not dragging out this sad chapter. I'd like to think that I maintained Olmsted’s dignity by not dwelling on his diminished capacity.

I got the impression that you really liked Olmsted as a person and admired his work, but you weren’t fawning over him.

The more I got into the research the more I liked and respected him. It’s very satisfying to know this.  He had considerable flaws that I hope I mentioned; I found him on the whole an admirable, impressive person and I really liked him. 

But in order to render a full, human portrait of my subject, it was vital to attend to his flaws. For example, Olmsted was an awfully tough father.  That is maybe his most unattractive aspect, especially in contrast with his own kindly, loving father.  His children followed in his footsteps because he paved the way for their own professions, but also he tyrannically made them do it. They lived in the shadow of a great genius and difficult, demanding parent.  He would write them lengthy letters—sometimes twenty pages—with endless varieties of the same judgments, “You just don’t get it.” “You are not a man of genius." It’s the stuff of TV shows, akin to the patriarch on HBO's wildly popular "Succession." These are complicated relationships. It would be nice to sit down with the Olmsted children and find out what they thought of such a domineering father.  But  Frederick Law Olmsted Junior’s letters are dutiful and noncommittal; it wouldn’t have served him to run down his father’s reputation.  If he did it privately, there’s no evidence. 

There's also the Olmsted marriage—one of obligation, it appears.  Mary had been married to Fred’s brother John for only six years when he died of tuberculosis, leaving her with three young children. “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive,” John pleaded on his deathbed. It was an uneasy marriage. They had an intellectual connection. By 19th century standards they had a reasonable, respectful, productive collaboration, but it wasn’t a love for the ages.  Although Olmsted traveled continuously and was a prolific letter writer throughout his life, there were not a lot of letters between the couple.  And yet he wrote a fevered letter to an old flame forty years after they had met—and received a frosty reply.

But on the whole, while Olmsted has his share of personal flaws, I found him to be admirable from a historical context. That's not so common nowadays.  We're going through a period of re-evaluation—very necessary, I believe—when it comes to our nation's historical figures. Some were slaveholders, for example, or held prejudices that were in keeping with their times. But Olmsted was a red-hot abolitionist. Olmsted was deeply committed to democracy, progressive on many social issues, very ahead of his time. So, while he had his foibles, he holds up pretty well from a current perspective.

Your writing style and Olmsted’s are quite compatible.  Did you adapt your style to his or was that your style to begin with?

Olmsted's writings on the South are filled with amazing details and observations. But he was kind of a labored, turgid writer—he admitted as much himself. I'd like to think that my writing style is different. But I definitely found that I needed to adjust my style to properly approach a 19th century subject.

My previous subjects, Greenspan and Nader, were living people, deeply involved in current events. That required a kind of breathless, journalistic style of writing. I used shorter sentences and an energetic pace. With Olmsted I had to teach myself how to write in a more reverent voice; historical writing needs to be more languid, more leisurely.

That said, Olmsted was my first historical biography subject, and I received some criticism for my style. Some reviewers said that I sometimes slipped into language that was too casual, too modern.   Some writers ignore criticism of their work, but I try to read everything that is written about my work and learn from the criticism. I try not to be too defensive.

For my subsequent books, on Whitman and Antietam, I tried to put those lessons into practice. For instance, it would be a poor choice to write "A light clicked on for Whitman." The man lived in a pre-electric age. It's actually fun to try to come up with historical accurate analogies and metaphors that fit subjects, and their times. With a 19th century figure you can’t say “like a wailing guitar,”  but “like a wheezing calliope” might be appropriate.

How could you learn so much and do the extensive research Genius of Place requires in the short span of two years?

One of the important things I experienced at Fortune was these drop dead journalistic deadlines.  I learned to write very fast.  My first book, the biography of Alan Greenspan, had a nine months deadline; my editor wanted to strike while the iron was hot.  It was a nightmare. After about a month I was struggling and  got a one month extension.  Two years for the Olmsted book sounded luxurious to me. 

Did this time frame allow for focused energy that wasn’t unduly stressful?

I felt a little bit out of my comfort zone when writing about Olmsted.  It never felt relaxed, but I was in a productive zone where I was nervous and stressed to a degree, but the stress was  related to thinking  “I need to know this better. I’d better look into this more.”  Writing my last three books has been relaxing as I near the end, “I’ve got this.”  I’m driven by mild, relaxing anxiety.

That would be a good bumper sticker! You tell good stories.  Many sections of Genius of Place are nests of stories; like a Matryoshka doll, the initial story opens up to reveal still more stories, each compelling as it illustrates its points.  This is a subtle but very effective narrative technique.  Do you see the world—at least Olmsted’s—in terms of stories?  What advantages does this perspective have for the Olmsted biography?

My wife and I joke that if we know two things about a person we make up the rest, as we look for the third thing, with the wildest speculations. We may realize that we were wrong but we keep on doing it.  Whatever information I have to work with I’m going to  connect the dots–although I could be really, really wrong. It’s a way of being entertained.

Judging from your book, you present Olmsted as a self-driven type A-plus overachiever.  He must have been both exciting to be around and—at the height of his profession—hard to get along with. How did you decide what to emphasize about his personality, his relationships with family and friends, and his health in relation to his work?  If you see the world in terms of stories, it makes the people in it very interesting.

I wanted to create an interplay between Olmsted’s art and his life. He designed so many parks, but I decided to cover only a select group: notable projects where there is also an interplay with the events of his own life. Central Park is a good example. While working on it, he lost a child. He had to fight to keep the park's board from withdrawing funds. Both are dramatic. There was a kind of palace coup where the Central Park board sent him to Europe, ostensibly to rest up and gather inspiration for the park. But they also intended, while he was overseas, to make some changes to his creation that he would not be comfortable with. In any good drama there is an interplay between person’s public and personal life.  I chose to focus on that because it would animate this. Part of the majesty of Central Park was that it was developed against a backdrop of personal grief. 

What was Olmsted’s greatest skill?  He was something of a futurist.  He was so much a person of his times, but he also recognized times are going to change.  He was working for the future of posterity.  He planted a scrim of trees around Central Park to hide from view buildings that hadn't even been built at the time (of course, now the park is surrounded by tall skyscrapers). He was one of the first people to visit Yosemite and to say “This needs to be saved for posterity.”  Whether it be Buffalo or Milwaukee, parks needed to be developed.

Olmsted could see the future.  When he was traveling through the South he had a vision about what was wrong with slavery and how it could be eradicated during a time when others couldn’t imagine that. It was very interesting to write about a man who was a creature of his times and yet could see the future so clearly.  This contains the seed of his genius. 

How do you feel as a person about devoting your life to another person? 

I view biography as a collaboration between someone who had a particular set of skills who relies on someone else with a different skill set to tell the story. Someone could be a brilliant theorist but it would require someone else to popularize and to make the most of the person’s individual abilities.  In a soccer game you have a coach who brings out the potential of a striker. 

Olmsted didn’t tell his own story so others have to do it for him.  I felt perfectly comfortable in telling Olmsted’s story. Collaboration between the subject and the biographer is a very human endeavor. 

Lynn Z. Bloom’s fascination with life writing extends from her University of Michigan doctoral dissertation, How Literary Biographers Use Their Subjects’ Works: A Study of Biographical Method 1865-1962 to this interview with Justin Martin.  She is the author of Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical, numerous biographical articles, and autobiographical creative nonfiction essays including “Teaching College English as a Woman,” “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction,” and “Vanishing Point: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal” (Assay 10:2).  She has edited two women’s diaries of World War II internment in the Philippines: Natalie Crouter’s Forbidden Diary (of which a podcast is currently in progress) and Margaret Sams’s Forbidden Family. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Aetna Chair of Writing Emerita, University of Connecticut.

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