Welcome. I'm Vivian Arden, and I keep The Glass House, an online journal I've written in public since 1996. In the spring of 1998 I noticed that the journals I read at two in the morning had no way to find each other, so I started this ring with eleven of them and a great deal of help from the WebRing instructions. Tonight there are sixty-six.

What they have in common: grown-ups writing about their own real lives, as honestly as they can stand to. Marriages, children, illness, money, faith, grief, work, the kitchen table at 1 a.m. Some of them will make you laugh out loud. A few will make you want to call your mother. Please read them the way you'd want to be read: slowly, and kindly.

1. Write about your own real life. Not a novel, not a character, not a persona. I already have one of those jobs, and it pays better.
2. Update at least once a month. If you go quiet for two, I'll write to make sure you're all right, and then, gently, I'll take you off the ring until you're back. You can always come back.
3. Carry the ring box on your journal, near the bottom, with working Prev, List Sites and Next links. It's the only thing holding the house together.
4. Don't copy anyone's entries. Not a paragraph, not a line, not without asking the writer and giving her credit. These words cost people something.
5. Respect the privacy of the people in your journal. They didn't choose to live in a glass house; you did. Change names, leave out addresses and employers, and when in doubt, ask them first, or leave it out. (I learned this one the hard way. It's in my archives.)
6. Be kind in e-mail, to members and to readers. You can disagree with someone's life without telling them so.

Write to me at [email protected] with your journal's address, your name the way you'd like it listed, and a line or two about what you write. I'll read at least a month of your entries (really, all of them), and if it's a fit I'll write back with your place in the ring, your Prev and Next addresses, and the box to paste in. It usually takes me a week or two, longer when a book is due, which it is.

I don't take journals that are mostly about someone else: an ex you're angry at, a boss, a neighbor. Write about you. You're more interesting than they are anyway.

Click "Next" on any member's page and you'll go down this list; the last one wraps around to the first.

1. Dispatch from the Graveyard Shift — Renee Sadowski
   Eleven to seven in a room with no windows in the Nevada desert, answering 911: the calls, the insomnia, and The X-Files at four in the morning.
2. First Year, Room 114 — Tamika Owens
   A first-year seventh-grade English teacher in Baltimore on her students, her student loans, and crying in the car. Every new teacher should read her. So should every old one.
3. Notes of an Old Latin Teacher — Arthur Penhallow
   A retired Latin teacher and widower learning to cook, reading Marcus Aurelius, and getting ready for his son's wedding to another man.
4. Night School — Graciela Montoya
   A mother of four who cleans offices at night goes back to school for her degree, one essay at a time.
5. Mulligans — Greg Wendt
   A divorced dad on weekend custody, golf with his twelve-year-old, and answering the personal ads in the paper.
6. Between Here and There — Loretta Begay
   A young Diné woman writing from the college computer lab about her grandmother, her language, and a boyfriend in Phoenix.
7. Two Countries — Marisol Echeverria
   Born in Tijuana, living in San Diego: the border crossing, her sick mother, and becoming a U.S. citizen.
8. Porch Light — Odile Boudreaux
   A Cajun widow in Houma in her first year without her husband: bingo at church, and learning the computer.
9. One Day at a Time on Bourbon Street — Jimmy Robichaux
   A French Quarter line cook, eighteen months sober, on staying that way in a kitchen full of drinking.
10. The Understudy — Stephen Garrity
    An actor who got his life back on the AIDS cocktail, working out what to do with it.
11. Mission Elapsed Time — Lakshmi Raghavan
    An aerospace engineer in Pasadena on her parents' marriage plans for her, and a very bad week at work.
12. Hill Rat — Ben Adeyemi
    A young Capitol Hill staffer answers constituent mail by day and writes at night about loneliness and what his parents expect of him.
13. Thirty-Nine and a Sophomore — Rick Sokol
    A laid-off steelworker back at community college learning computers, and writing plainly about starting over.
14. Diamond Mom — Terri Vandermolen
    Her ten-year-old son has leukemia and a Little League season to finish. She is learning to breathe again. Keep the tissues close.
15. After the Whistle — Allison Reese
    A former college soccer player, fresh from the Women's World Cup final, works up the nerve to tell her parents about her girlfriend.
16. Burn Rate — Josh Adelman
    A dot-com cofounder in San Francisco keeps a weblog (his word) about hundred-hour weeks, stock options and the life he's missing.
17. Hem and Haw — Ana Lucia Barbosa
    A Brazilian seamstress in Newark on wedding dresses, her immigration papers, and her mother back in Minas Gerais.
18. Size Twenty-Two and Done Apologizing — Colleen Mahaffey
    A bridesmaid dress, a crush at work, and deciding to like herself. The title says it all, and she means it.
19. Behind the Chair — Yvette Starks
    An Atlanta salon owner on her clients' troubles, her son in the Army, and renewing her vows after twenty-five years.
20. Velma's Sampler — Velma Stroud, 88
    Eighty-eight, in Kansas, with her great-granddaughter at the keyboard: the Dust Bowl, her husband, and getting old. The member I'd most like to have supper with.
21. After the Storm — Rhonda Easley
    An Oklahoma mother whose house was taken by the May 3 tornado writes about the trailer, the insurance, and being afraid of the sky.
22. Chemo Brain — Laurie Szabo
    A mother of two writing her way through breast cancer treatment: the red drug, the wig, and the kids.
23. The Long Goodbye — Joan Mackey
    A wife caring for her husband, who has Alzheimer's at sixty-one.
24. Thirty Days, Again — Wayne Guidry
    A man in recovery from compulsive gambling counts his days and his dollars on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
25. Copy — Rebecca Hirsch
    An advertising copywriter on her third round of IVF, the office baby showers, and the two-week wait.
26. Crush — Rosa Ybarra
    An assistant winemaker writes through the 1999 harvest, and about her father, who still picks.
27. Kimchi and Hotdish — Anna Johansson
    A Korean adoptee raised in Minnesota, now a sous chef, searching for her birth family.
28. Three Chords and the Truth — Kelsey Dawes
    A songwriter waiting tables in Nashville: writers' nights, a boyfriend on the road, and doubt.
29. Gospel Truth — Ernestine Pugh
    A choir director and pastor's wife on her husband's stroke, the church, and a faith being tested.
30. Grace's Garden — Megan Albright
    A mother plants a garden for the daughter who was stillborn last September. She is pregnant again.
31. Late Bloomer — Len Oberholtzer
    A widower of seventy has fallen for a widow from the garden club, and his children have opinions. I'm on his side.
32. Letters from the Rue Mouffetard — Simone Wisniewski
    A French war bride, widowed in Ohio, goes home to Paris for the first time in twenty years.
33. Desert Storm, Still — Travis Hollingsworth
    A Gulf War veteran on the illness nobody can explain, the VA runaround, and his wife's two jobs.
34. Thirty Years On — Ray Villarreal
    A Vietnam veteran, thirty years home, finally joins a VA group and writes down what he never said.
35. Cat Lady, Allegedly — Wendy Lusk
    Three cats, blind dates, other people's weddings, a biological clock, and a fine, full life. Allegedly.
36. Paddle Out — Kai Akana
    A young surfer on the North Shore writes about losing his best friend to the ocean.
37. Adaptive — Jordan Levin
    A skier paralyzed in a car accident last year on rehab, anger, and the sit-ski waiting for the snow.
38. Stumps — Jess Carrow
    A young environmentalist in Oregon on her logger father, the mill closing, and loving them both.
39. Princeville Under Water — Lorraine Battle
    Our newest member. A teacher writing from her sister's house after Hurricane Floyd put her historic Black hometown under the Tar River. Please go read her.
40. Postdoc, Mother, Somewhere in Between — Hong Liu
    A Chinese immigrant postdoc in North Carolina on her lab, her husband in Ohio, and her son in Shanghai.
41. Lab Rat — Aisha Rahman
    A Bangladeshi-American medical student on anatomy lab, praying between classes, and her parents' pride.
42. Y2K Paid for the Boat — Gerry Voss
    A retired COBOL programmer, called back to fix a bank's Y2K bugs, on the money, the work, and the daughter he doesn't speak to.
43. The Night Clerk — Vernon Two Bulls
    A Lakota night clerk at a motel on the old highway on his guests, his kids, and staying sober.
44. Becoming Andrea — Andrea Holbrook
    A software engineer in San Jose writes about transitioning on the job, this year, in public. "Brave" doesn't begin to cover it.
45. Kernel Panic — Tessa Moravec
    A Unix sysadmin's weblog (her word): links, Linux gripes, and a long-distance romance that started on IRC. I understand one word in three and read every one.
46. Negative Space — Iris Quinones
    A Puerto Rican photographer in the Bronx on her brother, his methadone, and the pictures she can't stop taking. My neighbor on the SoHo block.
47. The Glass House — Vivian Arden
    That's me. A romance novelist's journal, kept in public since 1996. You're standing in the front hall.
48. Paint It Out — Theo Ruckert
    A Brooklyn painter with bipolar disorder on lithium, the highs he misses, and the work.
49. Morris at 82 — Morris Rosenzweig
    A Holocaust survivor in a Miami Beach condo started a journal at eighty-two because his grandson asked him to. Start at the beginning.
50. Pedro Pan — Ernesto Valdes
    He came from Havana alone at twelve, in 1961. Now his mother is dying in Miami, and he is writing it down.
51. Bridge Kids — Fabiola Joseph
    A Haitian nurse's aide in Little Haiti on her twins, her church, and the brother still in Port-au-Prince.
52. The World Through My Front Window — Deborah Kinsella
    A woman with agoraphobia on the shows that keep her company and the steps she takes, literally, toward the door.
53. Captioned — Monica Drury
    A Deaf mother raising a hearing daughter: the TTY, closed captions, and the Internet.
54. Balikbayan — Maricel Dizon
    A Filipina nurse working nights in Chicago on the money she sends home and the son she's raising by phone.
55. Tuesday League — Earl Mayhew
    A retired transit worker in Queens on bowling night, losing his wife, and his granddaughter moving in.
56. Nine-Two-One — Joyce Huang
    A Taiwanese American in Los Angeles, waiting for word from her family after the earthquake in Taiwan.
57. Two Names — Mae Tanabe
    Interned as a girl during the war, she writes now about memory, her garden, and her grandchildren.
58. Bosnian Coffee — Amra Hodzic
    A Bosnian refugee in St. Louis on her new life, her lost brother, and the coffee she makes every morning.
59. Greenwich Mean Time — Caroline Thorne
    A trader's wife in Connecticut has everything on paper, and has decided to leave.
60. Pastor's Wife, Unscripted — Leah Rutledge
    A small-town pastor's wife in Georgia on depression, expectations, and a counselor nobody at church knows about.
61. The Change — Nancy Callahan
    Fifty-one: menopause, the empty nest, and getting to know herself again. I nod so hard reading her I've hurt my neck.
62. Single Mother by Choice — Ruth Adler
    An attorney who had a baby on her own at thirty-eight, on sleep, work, and her parents coming around.
63. Survivor — Russell Tate
    He lost his partner and thirty friends to AIDS. He writes about surviving, dating again, and the hospice where he volunteers.
64. Two Moms, One Minivan — Janet Arellano
    Two women in San Diego raising a four-year-old: preschool, the second-parent adoption, and ordinary life, which is the point.
65. Firewatch — Arne Nygaard
    A retired smokejumper writes from a fire lookout tower about solitude, a bad fire season, and the son he's getting to know again.
66. Two Hundred Eleven Miles — Ellen Vickery
    A widow who walked the John Muir Trail alone at fifty-seven, writing about grief now that she's home.

This list was last updated September 26, 1999. If your link has moved, or I've spelled your name wrong, or you need a rest from the ring, write to me and I'll fix it. No explanations required.