Love

2020: The Ups and Downs, a New Year’s Eve Invitation, and Wedding Photos!

December 17, 2020 by Jo Maeder 2 Comments

A Year Like No Other How many times in 2020 did you say: “What a year!” I hope you didn’t lose a loved one to Covid-19 or meet with financial ruin. Surely, someone reading this has and you have my deepest sympathies. Please keep reading. I have something to invite you to at the end that might be […]

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Q&A: Jill McCorkle on dolls, dollhouses, tiny objects and what they have to do with writing and life

September 9, 2020 by Jo Maeder Leave a Comment

“I have always loved dolls. And yes, there are still within the love, those that have creeped me out!” – Jill McCorkle Jill McCorkle is a bestselling, award-winning author of unforgettable novels and short stories. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. […]

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FREE THINKING: The #1 way to increase happiness is…

November 20, 2017 by Jo Maeder 4 Comments

Life is not a bowl of cherries for anyone. We must take the bitter with the sweet, we’re told. But some people seem to have an innate melancholy they can never shake. Studies now show that we stay at the same level of happiness our entire life. There’s only one thing that’s been proven to […]

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BEATING THE ODDS: Finding Love at Any Age

November 6, 2016 by Jo Maeder 4 Comments

It was mid-January, 2014, still soon enough in the new year for the air to be charged with renewal and resolutions. My friend Rita had been in a long-term relationship with a wonderful man everyone adored. She adored him, too. But it had become more of a warm friendship than a romance. Her New Year’s […]

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MAMA JO REVISITED: Mother’s Day Without Her

May 7, 2016 by Jo Maeder 4 Comments

This Mother’s Day, 2016, marks the eleventh one without Mama Jo. It’s always been tinged with sadness since her passing, but this one will be particularly hard. I recently completed reading and editing the audiobook of When I Married My Mother. I read it four times, all nine hours, before I had it right. Every single […]

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BURIED WORDS OF WISDOM: Love, loss and what I tossed. Or didn’t.

March 23, 2015 by Jo Maeder 8 Comments

I’m going through two trunks of stuff related to a documentary I once tried to make about my aunt, Julie Arden, and her companion Charlotte Brooks. I’m determined to whittle it down to one big box. It should be easy. Just don’t look too closely. Keep the essentials. Toss, toss, toss. I find scraps […]

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HOLIDAY REMINISCENCES AND REGRETS

December 6, 2011 by Jo Maeder Leave a Comment

An adapted excerpt from the chapter “Watching a Photograph Slowly Fade” from When I Married My Mother “Are we putting up a Christmas tree this year?” Mama Jo asked when our third Thanksgiving as roommates rolled around. I groaned and was sorry I did. The first year we lived together, after uncovering the ornaments of […]

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JUST FRIENDS

November 13, 2010 by Jo Maeder 1 Comment

In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal’s character makes a passionate case that a man can’t be friends with a woman because he’s always thinking about having sex with her. In 2003, when I became friends with Ted, a transplanted Yankee radio engineer who set up my NC recording studio, many suspected something was […]

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