And here comes a young woman headed straight for me. She looked excited with wide-eyed brown eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, her reddish-brown hair pulled tight in a ponytail, revealing a fresh young, round face, and dimples like parenthesis around her lipstick-stained lips. She stopped in front of me where I was sitting behind a table and behind copies of my [...]
The brightness of a sunny spring day and the clarity of a blue sky forced their way into the meeting room's tall windows. Multiple rows of six chairs were lined up like soldiers readying for their commands while a podium stood at the front of it all. The Chicago Writers Conference (CWA) was about to start. This was my first [...]
I find most reasons writers write are self-centered, inner directed, maybe even self-serving. Don’t get me wrong. I consider writers to be artists and artists create from the self, personal expressions manifested through words or pictures. But I wonder if there could be more to the egocentric responses." “Why I Write,” a title of an essay consistently pops up in writing [...]
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Our time is filled with input. We stare at screens of many kinds– desktop computers, laptops, phones, iPads, televisions – being inundated by someone else’s thoughts, a type of pre-programmed programming. We become sedentary in body and in mind where our bodies cease to move through a sensory environment and our minds become [...]
Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi on Pexels.com When recently rifling through a slush pile of started-but-never-finished blog posts, I came across one I remembered where noise in silence appeared to be the topic. I thought about what is silence and the absence of it. Are we ever really in a state of silence? I thought I'd pick up where [...]
There’s a tinge of change in the air. Maybe it’s the air’s cooling in the evening or the lack of sunlight awakening chirpy birds in pre-dawn. Perhaps the change is marked by kids returning to school. Though a season’s transition is knocking on the calendar’s door, I remain driven to the outdoors. Late summer into early fall delivers a changing [...]
Writing my memoir was like driving down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Upon my return from being away from the city for a few years, the order of exits was fuzzy in my memory, creating a challenge to my navigation. I had once depended on knowing each exit like a marker signaling when to turn or to keep going. My [...]
Whether we realize it or not, we’re making connections every hour of the day. No, I’m not talking about connecting to new friends on Facebook, hashtagging our posts, or following others on Instagram. The connections I’m referring to are organic, emotional and are a part of our walk through the every day. My recent read of Alice Water’s memoir, Coming [...]
It was a day where the sky was washed in endless blue and I could see where the tips of the trees ended and the heavens began. The air was pure and light as if it could carry a feather swinging in lateral paths. A small airplane flew overhead, dividing the atmosphere. Its nose came into focus, the twin engines [...]
I recently read through the “memoir” category of books in Kirkus online reviews to see a mixture of abuse and dysfunction, trauma and grief. These were just a few of the many descriptions among an emotional tumult of topics. Though my heart was heavy, I couldn’t relate to their experiences. And because of this, I saw what most other memoirs [...]