Warning: This post has reptiles. If slithering snakes give you the heebie jeebies, you may want to skip this one. For my birthday this year, I went to see the Reptile Zoo in Monroe, WA. From this trip with my husband and six-year-old, I managed to squeeze a poem. I suppose I should start by… Read more
Writing
Last night, the director kept stopping us in that annoying way that band leaders have. “We’ve got to get those triplets sharp. Some of you are thinking you can just slip through them at a relaxed pace and it’s throwing us off,” he said. “I am not in a parade up here waving at you… Read more
Have you ever thought you were done? And then you weren’t? Yesterday, I thought, was my last day of this never-ending summer quarter at school. I woke up early, eager to get to the day. I took a shower, fed the critters, and shocked the coffee shop I go to by getting there two hours before… Read more
Not too long ago, I was correcting papers and wishing the writers would not be so inventive with their sentence structures and vocabulary. I would see something with a phrase, a comma, or an unfamiliar word like ‘thalassemia’ and sigh. I had an prickly sense that something was off but wasn’t strong enough on the structure to… Read more
This Wednesday, I need to pause the blog while I madly craft a query letter, hoping to be chosen and learning from the jump into the unknown. If you have a book of your own to pitch, check out Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars. It’s quite the writing adventure she has put together. I’ll let you… Read more
On Sunday, I drove across the Cascade Mountains to sunny Yakima for a three day teaching conference. In this city my grandparents once called home, I let the sun melt away my everyday stresses and felt my curiosity perk up. While strolling the neighborhood, I discovered churches with large blocks of dark stone rising above the city… Read more
I have two places to find books when I want to know what to read next. It was strange to me that in those two separate places I found first Moriarty and then Holmes, two books I adored. 1. My Mother’s Kindle A while back, my six-year-old dropped my electronic book. This is what I… Read more
Over ten years ago, I took a class on adult psychology in a small classroom on Pill Hill in Seattle. The professor stood in front of us in a button up shirt with slacks that blended into the dark background of the room behind. As he described his experience of a wrenching divorce, he said he… Read more