Betsey Stockton
On my father’s side, my great-great-great-grandparents, Jabez and Sarah Vodrey, emigrated from England to the United States in 1827.
Catherine S. Vodrey
Catherine S. Vodrey. Writer (six books), mama to Slim and Sparky, chocolatier, smartass.
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Goofball etymology starting with C
More from my beloved 1933 Oxford English Dictionary
Goofball etymology from A to B
Maybe 35 years ago, during the process of splitting up my Vodrey grandparents’ stuff, my dad told me he wanted me to take their 12-volume 1933 Oxford English Dictionary. I had less than zero interest in this set. It was so gigantic and heavy and multi-volumed that I just couldn’t imagine using it much.
Here's your receipt!
When I was a kid, my hometown here in eastern Ohio was bustling with all sorts of mom-and-pop stores.
Words to live by
Quotes (quotations, more correctly) are kind of a thing with me.
What is THAT you’re saying?
The importance of . . . whaddya call it . . . CLARITY in communication
Local lingo in all its glory
When I was in high school, a man named Larry Evans came to speak to us about The Mill Hunk Herald. It was a western Pennsylvania quarterly in circulation between 1979 and 1989, and Evans was the founder and editor. Like here in East Liverpool, western Pennsylvania was chockablock with folks who worked at the steel mills and that was the magazine’s intended audience.
The evergreen joy of reading bad headlines
Mine was a newspaper family in a variety of ways — when I was a kid, we subscribed to both a morning paper (The Morning Journal, known both then and now as The MoJo) and an afternoon/evening paper (The Evening Review).
Charles Portis and why I love his work
The work of Charles Portis is not well-known enough, in my opinion, and I aim here to change that for just a wee few Americans as our semiquincentennial approaches.
Cooling off
I was reared in a family of inveterate George Booth fans, from my grandparents on down.
The eternal potato chip
There is scarcely a more widely loved salty snack than the all-American potato chip, which reliably rises to its zenith in sales during the summertime.
Dessert for dinner
When my friends Marilyn and Sandy arrived for dinner last night, they were talking about a text I’d sent them earlier in the day, saying that we were going to have something for dinner that
Visionary Trollope
If you want to have a nice lie-down on the fainting couch every time politics pops up in general conversation, here’s a superior prescription: English novelist Anthony Trollope.
Critters pretty much everywhere you look
Some years ago, while Sissy was at the beach, I was charged with feeding her cat Libby.
Bands you've never heard of, and for good reason
My kids Sparky and Slim and I have a longstanding tradition of coming up with fake band names, to the point that about a decade ago, I started designing t-shirts to commemorate our creations.
The little things
Springtime in the eastern Ohio woods
S. J. Perelman will make you laugh
I can't figure out why more people aren't reading him today
Baking truisms
A baker's dozen of good kitchen tips
A poem I wrote for the 2024 eclipse
Two years ago today
Writing about writing, Part II of II
From a talk I gave at Carnegie Mellon University in 2002