Spoiler Warning: If you haven’t seen Finding Dory and still want to be surprised, don’t read this. I recently told my English class that I have two sons. One is 17 and the other is 6. This means, I told them, that I have been watching kid movies since 1999. Many of the films numbed my… Read more
Writing
If you want to find a good read, go to a writing conference. Writers, I have learned, are jittery about their own books. As often as not, we struggle to tell you what our books are about or why we fell in love with our own stories enough to spend days, months, and years writing them. But as soon as… Read more
In the early 1990s, I traveled to Germany and became desperately homesick. I had decided I wanted to really learn German and went on a work visa to Hamburg, far away from the American military bases. I lived with a German friend in her apartment and found a job serving banquets in a nearby hotel. My German… Read more
“For this weekend, you get to call yourselves writers loud and proud instead of in a small voice at the end of a long list of other things you do.” My writing teacher Lois Brandt said this (or something very like it) at the beginning of our Weekend on the Water retreat with the Society of Children’s… Read more
I am hovering on the edge of doing anything writerly lately. I look at the work I need to do, lift my pen, scribble a few words, and then put the pen back down. The keyboard isn’t much better. I’ll open programs, stare at a screen, and then wander away to vacuum. Or worse. I’ll… Read more
I’ve struggled with what to write this week. Much has happened. A double funeral with dear friends who lost a mother and a father in two days. The kindness of neighbors who could have hurt us but didn’t. Neither of these are my stories to tell, though. So I won’t. I did see something that… Read more
This will be a short post. The door is done! Done! (I ache to replace the hardware with silver but have no more oomph for that sort of insanity.) For now, I’m back to my usual groove of teaching and writing. A new quarter begins this Monday and I am gearing up for a poetry workshop… Read more
How to get yourself to write in nine easy steps: Tell yourself to take the week off. Give yourself some terrible, awful, no good house chore that you think will be fun like painting your front door. (Simple laundry or bathroom cleaning chores won’t work. It must be something dreadful.) Ask at least three cranky over-worked… Read more