Whenever I called out at night to my parents from my bedroom, they were there in a flash asking what I needed. Blanketing me with their love, they comforted me in every way possible. At bedtime, my father checked underneath my bed for monsters. After a bad...
My grandmother kept a baseball bat underneath her bed. Every night she’d collect the day’s burglaries, rapes and murders from the eleven o’clock news and then slide her nightstand in front of the door before climbing into the bed. Whenever my sister and I slept over...
Are we writers or women who write? Ten of us gathered for the 2013 Oaxaca Women’s Creative Writing and Yoga Retreat (link to http://wp.me/p1v1Ek-3Aa) in Oaxaca, Mexico, last week and revisit this question repeatedly during the eight days we are together. Our...
These rocking chairs speak to me. They say “Sit a while, be still. Stop worrying about the future. You can’t predict how it’s all going to turn out.” But, I feel chaotic right now. I think there’s a turning point coming in my life and I’m overwhelmed by the...
I awoke this morning stiff and sore at the sight of winter’s black, littered sidewalks. It’s in the low 30’s, the snow is melting and spring is just toying with us. The clocks are shooting bullets and minutes and seconds into our daylight hours and when I awake...
I do good beginning, ask anyone who knows me. If you want an idea about how to get from here to there, where to move to, what new career would suit you best, or what’s a fun thing to do with $50 – go ask Dulcie, she’s got a million of them. Starting a new day, a new...
Adaptation may be the perfect prompt for a writer who generally starts out with one thing in mind, and ends up with something else entirely. And then I realize, it’s pretty much the way my life goes too. So I had to do it, write about adaptation. I had every intention...
I’ve been thinking seriously about love poems. What does that term mean? Is the idea of loss inherent in the DNA of a love poem? Is a love poem something transient? Like a novel you keep coming back to, does the meaning change depending on the stage of life of the...
UNVEILING YOUR STORY Pay attention, Mary Oliver directs us. That is rule number one in her Instructions for Living a Life. But it is not enough to pay attention. We must be astonished, she commands. Nor shall we stop at astonishment, for that is selling the world...
Julia is fourteen years old and the youngest member of my Thursday morning art class. When I first started, I thought it was odd that she wasn’t in school. But then I learned that she went to an alternative school that allowed her to spend more time developing her...
