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 [...]
The sun rose just enough above the horizon that morning to obscure my vision. My morning walk through a path in the woods was brisk in pace and in weather as I carried a load of thoughts from the weeks of stuffing bags with my mother’s clothes to be given to the church, a plastic bin with photographs of her [...]
As the fall mornings evolve and daylight diminishes, I find myself waking in the dark. It feels like just yesterday when the early morning sun lifted quickly over the horizon, rousing me from sleep, and the bedroom would take on a lighted glow. Now, I struggle to see any hint of light through the trees; the room remains dark. I [...]
Though it may sound counterintuitive, writers have been distracted during this pandemic. But how can we be now that we're no longer engaged in a multi-tasked life previously understood as “normal?” Self-isolation should give us nothing but time to write but we can't seem to get the job done. The absence of what filled my time, a void, became the [...]
This morning I ripped the month’s page away from the year. March, defined by thirty-one small white boxes, was filled with ink, a few arrows, and many cross outs. The month was a busy one for me as scheduling dominated my weeks. From an electrician called to my home to replace a switch, but needed to reschedule for a day [...]
I would be remiss if I didn’t write about my reflections during this time of isolation because of the corona virus, when connecting is at odds with social distancing. I know we’ll look back on this when future conversations will begin “remember when” stories that will never end. I think of memories being made now for those “remember when’s” later. [...]
Last month I posted “truth didn’t set me free.” It was about my experience one early January morning in a courtroom. I read the post a week later and then took it down. As a memoir writer, I didn’t like how I wrote it; there should be more meaning to the experience than what I had written. But I wondered [...]
I sized up the sock I was knitting. While following a standard pattern—a one size fits all—I realized my almost-completed-sock would not fit my smaller-than-average foot. I thought about how the term sometimes can’t be taken literally, as for clothing, for example, or figuratively, like for a weight-loss program. I was reminded how “one size fits all” didn’t apply [...]
Memoir writer Alice Tallmadge said it best in an essay, “Your First Book, When the Cheering Stops,” - “But your writing mind is as empty as a flat pocket. You can’t imagine writing another paragraph, ever. You say you are taking a break. And you do. (https://bit.ly/2JzmG7U) And I did. Taking a break from writing seemed to be an excuse, [...]