I don’t “channel” people, but if I did, I would tell you Andy Rooney told me to write this essay. I heard his voice in my head, and it stayed with me until I finished. But who am I to say it sounds like him? If I do anything heroic before I die, which I […]
In my twenties I began a diary. I’d make the typical entry, about what happened during my day and jot down philosophical thoughts. (Eventually, I kept a record of a special period of my life that I wanted to savor and give to a special person one day. I’ll tell you about this later in […]
My mother grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm in rural Taneytown, Maryland. My father’s hometown was rural Greenfield, Massachusetts, and he enjoyed spending time on a farm his relatives operated. As a child, my family lived in the busy New York suburbs in Connecticut. Both parents couldn’t wait for summertime to get back to […]
When creating his iconic paintings, Norman Rockwell went all out with one-hundred-percent focus. There was the communication with book and magazine editors who fed him ideas. Then, Norman would painstakingly create layouts with strong design elements. Since he demanded of himself that his paintings appear genuine, he searched for models until he found the one […]
I first met Mary Immen Hall at my book signing for my book Cows in the Fog and Other Poems and Stories in the Bennington Bookshop, Bennington, Vermont. I mentioned that I had spent three months a year a short distance from Rockwell’s studio in West Arlington. Mary and I became “fast friends” after she […]
When I began expanding the social media campaign for my upcoming book about Norman Rockwell’s Vermont models, a troubling image came to mind. I pictured myself sitting in a small motorboat just off the seashore, wondering where in the world to cast my line. I felt overwhelmed by the vast ocean. I was aware that […]
The most http://Sthaggerty.com Coming up with an idea for a book is like any other project. You want to make sure that if you put your blood and sweat into it, you’re creating a book others will find worth reading. I want to create books people will love. A carpenter does not simply order a […]
One of the neat things about conducting interviews in Vermont for my book Call Me Norman, The Stories of Rockwell’s Beloved Vermont Models, is that I renewed old friendships and made new ones. This came just when I needed it because we had just lost Charley Bentley, who had been my family’s closest friend in […]