Coffee with a canine: Christina Baker Kline & Lucy

Today's featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Christina Baker Kline & Lucy.

On Lucy's influence on the author's writing:

Every morning, Lucy roams around trying to get a feel for whether anyone will be at home, and in which rooms. She tries out one spot – splayed on the hall landing, a watchful eye toward the front door – but soon abandons it for another. She jumps on an unmade bed and turns around three times, sinks down, curls into a ball. After a while she stretches out long, her belly as rounded and freckled as a cow’s.

I have my own version of this routine: a mug of hot coffee, a comfortable chair – no, perhaps the old chaise in the sunroom window – a college-ruled notepad (faint blue lines on white paper, a firm pink margin), an old-fashioned micro-point Uniball pen. Circle three times, curl in a ball...[read on]

Christina Baker Kline is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be. She is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University and lives outside of New York City.

Among the praise for Bird in Hand:

“I hesitate to call Kline a ‘serious novelist’ for fear of obscuring her easy style and fluid metaphor-making...but she’s the real deal. Kline dramatizes private life, from the charged crosscurrents of broken families to the robust intimacies of sex, with a generous, knowing appreciation of human nature.”
—Boston Globe

The Page 69 Test: Bird in Hand.

Learn more about Christina Baker Kline's work at her website and her blog, A Writing Life: Conversations about the Creative Process.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Christina Baker Kline & Lucy.

--Marshal Zeringue