In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation with My Father makes a request to the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story once again,” her father says, “the way Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov wrote… just recognizable people and then write what happened to them next.” His effort, and his failure to
What happened to Vee Ripken? Just before Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her Tucson home, the mother of a Major League Baseball legend faced a bizarre kidnapping plot. Vee Ripken was the mother of MLB star Cal Ripken, Jr. Vee Ripken was 82 and died in 2021. She “was once the victim of a bizarre kidnapping.”
Clark was a child in 1981 when her mother, a member of a radical leftist group, acted as the getaway driver in the robbery of a Brink’s truck. His new novel is based on his later years.