The good Lord was willing but the creek did rise. Last Tuesday no new blog post! The creek was a flood of words on the subject of “Birthing Cynara, Windsor, and Hope: a novel reader turned novel writer (at forty) reflects on: talking back, speaking up, well shaped silences; the scholars who played midwife to her fiction; and the novels her novels talk to from Epitaph of a Small Winner to the Coldest Winter ever.” Mainly I talked about ‘the baby plot.’            I am writing from the literal middle of Pennsylvania, from the Nittany Lion Inn in University Park which this weekend is the epicenter of Contemporary African American Novel studies. Lovalerie King, a scholar with roots in Arkansas but with a globe spanning reach, put on a powerful conference.