MY UPCOMING ‘DROPOUT MEMOIR’ is no longer a private matter—not some secret document whose life plays out on my dining table and my editor’s desk. Recently it pulled itself together into what’s called an Advance Reading Copy, resembling a paperback version of the book-to-be, and showed off at BookExpo America, a trade fair at the Javits Center in New York City. Yup, that’s the cover in grande size, above, adorning the Grand Central Publishing booth…and a few of the remaining pretend books standing in front of David Baldacci’s next real blockbuster. Besides the jpg, GCP sent me an actual copy of the book lookalike (bookalike?), too, which I immediately showed to Jack the Demon Cat. [Read more...]
new book hits city (and demon cat jack hits sack)
June 10, 2010
beans, bees and poetry: how i named my book
May 13, 2010
‘AND I SHALL HAVE SOME PEACE THERE’ (February 2011) got its title from a poem I first read in college, more than 30 years ago. For each of us, I suppose, there is a poem or poems that we never forget; William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is one of mine. When it was time to name the book I had just finished writing, in November 2009, I could think of nothing better to call it than the Yeats line that had long called out to me: [Read more...]
what do steve martin and i have in common?
April 25, 2010
NO, I WAS NOT BORN IN WACO, TEXAS, nor do I play the banjo. And no, I never worked at Disneyland, though these days I feel as if I live in a fairytale, if not a theme park, exactly. Lately, nonetheless, I have developed something in common with Steve Martin (and Amy Sedaris and Jon Stewart and a few other writers who get out of the house a little more frequently than I do). Somehow my upcoming corporate-dropout memoir ended up on the cover of the same catalog as their new books. Yup. “And I Shall Have Some Peace There” by Margaret Roach: There it is. [Read more...]
my dropout memoir, due february 2011
February 24, 2010
AFTER I LEFT MY FANCY ‘MARTHA’ JOB on the last day of 2007, I mostly sat at the old Swedish farm table (below), staring out the window, month after month—or at least that’s how I remember it. Somehow by the summer of 2008 I had a book proposal; by that fall a book contract; and a year later a manuscript. [Read more...]
IN DECEMBER 2007, I made the life-altering decision to walk away from New York City and my job as Editorial Director of Martha Stewart, a career many would describe as highly successful. But I craved completely different rewards: solitude, a return to the personal creativity of writing, and a closer connection to nature and my first passion, the garden I'd been making on weekends for 20 years. I moved to a rural New York State town of 300, began 
