5 Suggestions to Help you Stay Motivated
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ROOTS
Heading north on Lake Shore Drive, summer sapphire skies complimented the pale green lake with its waves creating a rhythm that blended with the beats of my heart. But when winter winds demanded attention, grey skies clashed with blue-grey water, a tiring violence. Oak Street, Division, North Avenue, Fullerton, Belmont. I named each exit. Addison, Waveland. I used to get on the bus at Addison and the inner drive at 7:30 in the morning to go to work. During summer weekends, I’d stroll through the park at Waveland with a [...]
EVOLUTION
It is evolution as I sit with pen in hand recalling my beginnings in school, learning the alphabet and how each letter sounded separately and then together and then taking a book in my hand and learning to read as I said out loud the words together to make sentences and discovered complete thoughts where now I've taken the beginnings and molded my own structures to form stories that are excavated from layers below the cracked surface drawing upon that lonely day in class sitting on a tiny wood chair [...]
“Creative Nonfiction”
"There are two basic approaches to creative nonfiction," according to Lee Gutkind, author of You Can't Make this Stuff Up, - memoir/personal essay and immersion nonfiction. I get how immersion is creative nonfiction but the memoir/personal essay part still remains unclear as to how that genre could be under the creative nonfiction umbrella. Gutkind writes that creative nonfiction, referred to as the fourth genre, has become the most popular genre in the literary and publishing worlds. I understand it gives the writer a flexibility and a freedom yet still sticking [...]
Life is Good
. . . exerpt from Under the Birch Tree We took photographs in front of the picture window at our brick house on Carlisle Street because it was the perfect suburban backdrop. Two-story homes sat like gems on their velvet lawns set with oak and maple trees and manicured hedges. I remember my picture was taken there on my first day of kindergarten with my favorite tree in the center of circling hedges. The birch tree’s branches did not shade my eyes squinty from the sun’s high noon rays. My [...]
Did you get lucky?
Now before you start scanning this post looking for juicy, eye-catching tidbits suggesting anything sexual, let me tell you this question has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with luck. Or is it really luck? In a previous post I talked about being asked what it is I "do." And, in turn, I ask others what it is they do. If I'm "lucky" I could say I was a writer or even a banker once, or better yet, an account executive and then I just "worked in [...]
How do they do it?
I've been writing now for over ten years. When I started, I didn't have much to say, but I had much to say. What I mean is, I had many thoughts I wanted to express but I couldn't seem to get it all down. I knew in the end, there was a story, a lesson, perhaps. And my challenge was to connect with the reader and navigate him or her to the end. I admire those writers, newspaper columnists, for example, who can turn a thought about offending someone, for [...]
Carlisle Street
The folded blueprints I plucked from my grey bucket came from the building department at the village. They felt like a treasure in my hands; I wanted to delve into them with abandon. I separated the inky paper folds, spreading the map flat on the floor. I squatted to read the details of the reverse print. The building commissioner had given his approval, stamped September 4, 1964. We were lot #18 in Colony Point. William D. Murphy was the architect . . . ¾” Driftwood panelling in the family room, [...]