Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyลkyล among the... Continue Reading →
This post is part of the monthly #AuthorToolboxBlogHop. Read more great posts about writing here! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5 I'm teaching The Great Gatsby this term,... Continue Reading →
Harsh feedback taken too personally caused me to stop writing for four years. Angry, afraid, but mostly ashamed, the voice of self-doubt grew enormous in me, any time I had an idea or a vague vision of a story--hold off, I told myself. Wait to write the perfect thing. So many of the barriers to... Continue Reading →
My husband's and my goal for this summer was to settle: to root ourselves in a place for a length of time, to get to know it well, to accustom ourselves to some new surroundings, to avoid the pellmell back and forth of place-to-place travel, to focus, to breathe, to find some deeper sense of... Continue Reading →
Not a writing-related post today, at least not explicitly. I'm departing tomorrow for summer travels. We'll be in Italy, and my plan is to make a large amount of time while we're there for writing. Best wishes to you, with love,Jimmy Bird tracks, April 13, 2013 In November of 2016, my computer crashed. Just a... Continue Reading →
In January of 2016, a dear friend gave me the gift of a little Daruma doll. Growing out of Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition, the idea with these figurines [and the one I received is very minimalist compared to many of them] is to encourage perseverance and working towards a goal. When one sets a goal,... Continue Reading →
Today is, I think, the sixth or seventh day I haven't done significant writing work. As in, I have pulled up the Word tab languishing at the bottom of my taskbar, stared at the winding sea of paragraphs, contemplated the next, set my fingers on the keys--and then it was too much. Something I didn't... Continue Reading →
Sometimes, those days come when we page back through old writing, scroll up in a long WiP to where it all began, where perhaps no one has looked for years. What do we find? How do we relate to what we wrote in our pasts? How do we understand where we have come from, and... Continue Reading →
I recently finished reading Naomi Alderman's The Power, for me a game-changing look at gender and historical power hierarchies. The engrossing story that follows the sudden reversal of gender hierarchies worldwide opens with a letter from its fictional author, a member of The Men Writers Association. The book has me thinking about #OwnVoices literature and its... Continue Reading →
Nearly four years has passed since I decided I would make writing a central part of my life. It's the end of the year. My journey as a writer has taken me deep into myself, and I am feeling more sure than I did four years ago, more than I did one year ago. Let... Continue Reading →
Words like trees 