Anna Amiradaki

The first time I met my now best friend, she had dropped off her son for a playdate, and I invited her to stay for dinner. Somehow apologetically I said "I'd love for you to stay for dinner but I am afraid I only have peasant food to offer- it's lentil soup and home-made olive bread for us tonight". My friend smiled with a deep warm smile and said "But, Anna, this is a real delicacy, and honestly, the best kind of food! I love lentil soup!". That evening, as we enthusiastically shared a bowl...

The Solace of Craft There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives when you make something with your hands. Not the brittle quiet of distraction—screens dimmed, notifications silenced, the mind still buzzing like a light left on in the next room—but the deeper hush that comes when your body remembers what it was made to do. When fingers find their work. When time, instead of being chased, becomes a companion walking beside you. Craft is not merely a hobby. It is a small, stubborn form of...

Before the book tours and the shiny stickers on the cover, there was a kitchen table. A pot of coffee, a stack of bills, a notebook pushed between crumbs and school forms. In Rhode Island, some of the world’s most beloved stories began exactly like this—scribbled after bedtime, drafted on lunch breaks, whispered into the glow of a quiet lamp. Writers in Our Backyard  is Khiton’s intimate conversations with these local voices: the authors who went from neighborhood walks to New York Times...