After a lengthy hiatus from writing memoir to write a second book, my first of fiction, I returned to memoir, and recently completed an essay about my mother and I during her final months of life . . . or so I thought. Yes, grief was palpable throughout the paragraphs, yet, when I read the essay a final time before [...]
Early one sticky morning while on a walk through the woods, I tried my dexterity at selfie-videoing (is that what it's called?) I found it takes practice, and an artistic eye. My face moved in and out of the frame, my head moved up and down, though I was not agreeing to anything. Perhaps it was a lack of hand-eye [...]
Lately, I’ve been into writing styles as I plow through my summer reading list. I read closely for the tone, word choice, grammar, and language, the author manipulates to tell a story. I can’t help but to scrutinize what I read, from personal essays, and women’s fiction, to even nonfiction books about trees. My traveling eyes home in on a [...]
I’m in a slump. The Wisdom of the Willow is completed, polished, shiny and bright, awaiting publication; the momentum of writing an outline for my third book has slowed to a crawl; a documents file of half-baked writing projects has been left to bake further; and I can’t think of a thing worth reflecting on for any meaningful monthly blog [...]
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Before my mother’s passing and when she would ask me questions, of which I don’t remember specifically what they were—something about how we live our lives, why bad things are happening in the world—I tried to answer in simple terms as I am not one for offering deep philosophical explanations. “You have an answer for [...]
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is today. This is an essay I wrote a few years ago and have amended with fresh memories and impressions of a day I spent in remembrance. Sometimes, I like to see my world as being black or white, segregated into neat piles. My tidy thinking and tendency to categorize allows me to understand, to make [...]
The other day I opened a plastic bin filled with my mother’s personal things. When emptying her apartment months ago, I had stuffed into them files and papers and notebooks and photographs and more notepapers from drawers in her desk and nightstand and metal files. I then covered the bins with their tight lids as if to preserve her life, [...]
winter willow I sat on the floor and pulled the lid from a squat octagonal storage bin, releasing a crisp waft of evergreen. Inside, a trove of trinkets lay in beds of crinkled butcher paper. They varied in size, shape, color—and age. I rummaged through the collection, my fingers becoming sticky from leftover tree sap clinging to the Christmas tree [...]
I’ve all but forgotten about my anniversary. This memory-maker was neither of a person nor of a place, but with a thing. When “three years ago on this day” popped up on social media, a promotional ad I had created for it, I was prompted to remember the soon-to-be anniversary. This time, it wasn’t about the big memory itself, the [...]
At a recent get-together with my now twenty-something nephews, I saw their once little boy smiles and tender eyes in each of their now matured-men faces. I couldn’t help but to remember them from years ago, their arched necks looking up when walking narrow city streets in Chicago, fearless busy bodies scaling jungle gyms at the playground, mesmerized focus while [...]