Skip to content

CARITA GARDINER

What to Read When You're Avoiding School Work

Menu
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
  • “Why”…Wednesdays
  • GrammarLove
  • Contact/Subscribe
Menu

“Why”…Wednesdays

274. Why You Know Yourself Best

Posted on March 27, 2024March 26, 2024 by caritagardiner

[Before I get into the actual topic, I want to talk about the photo above. Our dog, Tuukka, passed away in January. He would have been eleven next month. We loved having him in our lives. I selected the photo above because I have been thinking about him and wanted to share a photo that…

Read more

273. Why You Don’t Know Yourself

Posted on March 20, 2024March 19, 2024 by caritagardiner

It’s true, what it says above, that you know yourself better than other people know you. However, I posit that you don’t know yourself well enough yet. Here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve heard people cop out of trying to do things by saying, “I know myself, I won’t ever…” You can fill in the ending…

Read more

272. Why Their Idea Was a Win-Win-Win

Posted on March 13, 2024March 13, 2024 by caritagardiner

I vividly remember the dress I got to wear when my beginner ice-skating class had roles in Robert Crown’s Nutcracker on Ice circa 1978. The dress was white with a three-tiered skirt that billowed out for as long as I could spin fast enough. I believe my group were all sugar plum fairies, but I…

Read more

271. Why It’s Not about the Hockey

Posted on March 6, 2024March 3, 2024 by caritagardiner

This morning, I skated my last practice of the 2023-2024 winter season as a Salisbury Stinger. At this point, I’ve been on the adult women’s ice hockey team for close to twenty years, and what a couple of decades they have been! As a team, we’ve been through a lot. In early March, 2020, I hosted…

Read more

270. Why Pre-Pay

Posted on February 28, 2024February 27, 2024 by caritagardiner

The photo above comes from an article about the importance of good communication (a skill that necessitates avoiding redundancies). My post doesn’t have anything to do with the article, but I do enjoy the humor of the image. (If you want to read the article, you can click the photo; it’s a link.) Instead, I’ve…

Read more

269. Why The Flame and the Flower

Posted on February 21, 2024February 19, 2024 by caritagardiner

I recently read, on lots of podcasts’ recommendations, Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower. Published in 1972, the book “revolutionized the historical romance genre.” As a student, avid reader, and future author of romance, I thought it would be interesting and informative to read the book that started the “bodice-ripper” genre. I was right….

Read more

NetGalley Review of Passion Under the Microscope

Posted on February 16, 2024February 15, 2024 by caritagardiner

title: Passion Under the Microscope author: Christine Miles publisher: Sealed with a Swoon Books publication date: March 19, 2024 pages: only on Kindle, so ?? peppers: 3 (on this scale) warnings: none summary: Tanith, a high school science teacher sprains her ankle while trying to get a photo (for her class on reproduction) of mating birds. Her…

Read more

268. Why MC

Posted on February 14, 2024February 12, 2024 by caritagardiner

If you’re reading this post the day it goes live, Happy Valentine’s Day. The day designed to celebrate love seemed the perfect time to talk about one of the people I feel so grateful to have in my life that I think finding her was meant to be. Sometimes, connections between people are written in…

Read more

NetGalley Review of Match Me if You Can

Posted on February 8, 2024May 3, 2024 by caritagardiner

title: Match Me if You Can author: Swati Hegde publisher: Dell publication date: 4 June 2024 pages: 304 peppers: 2 (on this scale) warnings: alcohol-induced vomit, heavy drinking summary: Jia is bored by her job writing a dumb romance advice column for a newspaper, so she funnels her passion into two things, her successful anonymous blog and…

Read more

267. Why the Messy Middle

Posted on February 7, 2024February 5, 2024 by caritagardiner

Don’t you love great before and after photos in glossy magazines? Or the makeover montage in a light movie? I do, and I also love reading the meet cutes and happily ever afters of every romance novel I pick up. Even knowing that the path from A to Z isn’t supposed to be a straight…

Read more
  • Previous
  • 1
  • …
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • …
  • 54
  • Next

WHAT I DO

I serve as a class dean and teach English to high schoolers at a boarding school in Connecticut. I’ve earned a Bachelor of Arts (Amherst College), an Education Master in Learning and Teaching (Harvard University Graduate School of Education), a Master of Arts in English (Bread Loaf School of English), and most recently a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a certificate in the online teaching of writing (Southern New Hampshire University).

As a writer, I hope to capture the complexity and joy of life in the New England boarding school world. On this site, I share what I know about trying to write fiction while deaning, teaching English, coaching, and doing the other tasks associated with helping to raise over six hundred other people’s children.

WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU

Teach                    Tutor

Revise                   Edit

Entertain             Enlighten

Follow Me

  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Contact Me

  • cgardine@hotchkiss.org

Read my recent “Why” Wednesday Blog Posts

  • NetGalley Review of Villa Coco
  • 388. Why Not “Could Potentially”
  • NetGalley Review of You Won’t Forget Me
  • NetGalley Review of The Valencia Expat Club
  • 387. Why Give Speeches
© 2026 CARITA GARDINER | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme