From the category archives:

Western Pennsylvania

Come Visit “The Parnassus Pen”

by Jenny 20 March 2018 History

This is Jenny, and I have a few items to discuss. First: Happy birthday to my youngest sister, O.S.G! Sis, if you are reading this, I want you to know that it was so much fun to watch you grow up! Second: Happy spring to everybody else. Now for the meat of this post: This […]

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Writing About the Ones That We Love

by Jenny 10 March 2018 Western Pennsylvania

So I few years ago, I read an article in one of the Pittsburgh newspapers about “The Girl Factory” by Karen Dietrich. This is a young woman’s memoir about growing up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania in the aftermath of a multi-fatality factory shooting that made its way into the national news cycle.  Both of the author’s […]

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Colonial Snakebite

by Jenny 25 February 2018 History

Snakes fascinate me. Today I pulled down “The Day Must Dawn,” by Agnes Sligh Turnbull. (This is a fiction novel about colonial Westmoreland County and the burning of Hannastown in 1782. The author grew up in New Alexandria.) I re-read the rattlesnake bite scene. A rattlesnake bites Viola, one of the main characters, on page […]

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Mystery Writing

by Jenny 24 February 2018 History

  First, I have many special memories about visits to bookstores. I grew up south of Somerset, PA. Even a trip to the “local” bookstore to buy the newest Baby-Sitters Club book was a special treat and an all-Saturday event. The bookstore was more than an hour’s drive from our house. We didn’t shop online […]

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The Parade

by Jenny 2 February 2018 New Kensington

So tonight I went through the photos that I took in New Kensington in 2017. Most came from the parade on the weekend prior to July 4. This was the 2nd year in a row that New Kensington donned a parade on the holiday weekend. The 2016 parade celebrated our city’s 125th anniversary. The 2016 […]

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All My Life’s a Circle

by Jenny 9 December 2017 Photography

  This is a photo of my maternal grandfather’s own grandparents. With their children. So, the married couple are my great-great grandparents, and one of the boys is my great-grandfather. This branch of my family was from the South Side of Pittsburgh. In fact, the studio stamp under this photo says: Fallert 1207 Carson ST. […]

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Dance With Me On the Dark Side

by Jenny 10 November 2017 History

          Hi, I’m back!   I have to recommend two more podcasts that I liked so much that I listened to them multiple times. I downloaded both of these from iTunes, but I’m linking here to each podcast’s actual website. Here’s the first: Tales of Terror Vol. 8 from “The Dirtbag […]

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Pre-Halloween Horrors

by Jenny 21 September 2017 Podcasts

  A few weeks into my junior year of college, one of my classmates, “Gwen,” passed away alone in her dorm room. Natural causes, from a longtime medical condition. On the same floor where I also lived. Our R.A., “Nan,” found Gwen during a welfare check after Gwen’s closest friends hadn’t seen her for a […]

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Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

by Jenny 12 September 2017 New Kensington

This isn’t actually a  book report of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” Maria Semple published her novel in 2012. Goodreads and Amazon is already clogged with such reviews. However, the motion picture (with big name stars!) for this story (which actually takes place mostly in Seattle) is being filmed in Pittsburgh – and also New Kensington! […]

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Tecumseh and the Prophet . . . and the Eclipse

by Jenny 23 August 2017 History

  Did you know that a solar eclipse darkened the Ohio and Pennsylvania sky in June 1806? (The path of totality ran through the Pittsburgh region!) This eclipse is an important character in one of my favorite stories about the early 1800’s. During these years, the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh allied Native American tribes against the […]

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