

Tales and Ales
This is how a little idea backed by a hugely generous community resulted in Tales and Ales, a storytelling event in Loudoun County, Virginia. I’ve always loved a good story. Years before I was writing stories, I was listening to them. My parents would often have friends over for dinner and, long after the dishes had been cleared and the other kids had dispersed, I could still be found sitting there—listening. Whether it was some wild story about a family friend’s standoff wit


The Case for Real News
This column, Margaret's Musings, appears regularly in Loudoun Now. When I was a child, my mother taught me a lesson about telling the truth that I’ve never forgotten. Born in England in 1937, I grew up in the shadow of war-torn Europe during World War II. I was 5 or 6 years old, and rode the bus eight miles each day to Hitchin Grammar School, which perched on a hill overlooking the town. My most pleasant memory of that institution is of sliding down the hill on a snowy day a