Martha Woodroof's "Small Blessings"

Martha Woodroof was born in the South, went to boarding school and college in New England, ran away to Texas for a while, then fetched up in Virginia. She has written for NPR, npr.org, Marketplace and Weekend America, and for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Feature Bureau. Her print essays have appeared in such newspapers as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Small Blessings is her debut novel. She lives with her husband in the Shenandoah Valley.

Here she passes on the opportunity to dreamcast an adaptation of Small Blessings:

I must say no, no, no! to visualizing actors as the characters in Small Blessings. They are much to specifically drawn inside my head for me to see them inhabited by anyone else. I blame my mother for this. She read aloud to me long past the age I was able to read to myself, and got me into the habit of such precise imagining that I was ruined for life as far as movie adaptations of books go.

This does not mean, naturally, that I wouldn't love to see Small Blessings made into a movie. Just don't ask me to help cast it, okay?

Visit Martha Woodroof's website.

--Marshal Zeringue