I seem to have a lot of conversations with people who want to write, but “not now.” I’ll do it when I feel more of an urge, they tell me, when I feel inspired, when the spirit moves me. And years go by and the writing still hasn’t happened. This is what I’ve learned from […]
This picture of my mother’s family hung on the wall of my childhood home, and I saw it in many of the houses I visited frequently as a child. Mom is about fifteen years old here, the first girl on the left in the front row, sitting beside her father. All told, my grandparents had […]
I’ve been reading (devouring) Fire Up Your Writing Brain, by Susan Reynolds (click on the title to go to her blog). Late in the book, Reynolds quotes Margaret Atwood on why a writer should read her own work aloud, a long-time practice of my own. Black marks on a page are like a musical score, they don’t […]
I’ve been thinking, for various reasons, about this phrase, “Best Practices,” which I was introduced to a long time ago, in graduate school and when I was teaching as an adjunct. The idea as I understood it then was that in a situation that is stubbornly imperfect — an intractable situation, or one in which […]