Last week I wrote that I wasn’t sure if I had put off writing because I was ill or because I had to write a difficult scene. I now know it was a little of both.
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Anna Quindlen’s latest book, Write for Your Life, is a paean to the lost art of personal writing. After the “democratization” of writing, says Quindlen, “Writing was a kind of handshake or embrace: Hello, I see you, I want to know and understand you. I want to understand myself.”
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I decided to “investigate” more carefully. Even if the landscape didn’t change, I could see and hear it differently.
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It has been ages since I picked up my knitting. Then I started reading Michelle Obama’s new book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times. This is what she had to say about knitting:
When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing to much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small.
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Every successful writer offers some variation of this piece of advice from Anne Lamott:
How to write: Butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair.
This my work chair, without my butt in it, because lately it’s been empty a lot.
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All news interests me. I read the NY Times and my local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, daily. I follow NPR. But right now, I wish I could block it all out. The war in Ukraine, climate change, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, conspiracy theories, partisan politics. COVID...
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My friend and haiku exchange partner recently sent me an article from Poetry Soup about the nonet, a nine line poem that starts with a nine syllable line and decreases one syllable each line until the last line of one syllable (9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1).
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Shortly after I agreed to coordinate my temple’s participation in a national get out the vote campaign, I saw a tweet from Adam Klepetar, the Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management at Berkshire Community Colleges.
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I met with the author Sonia Pilcer the other day. She is going to mentor me through the process of writing my grandmother’s story. “Get a notebook,” was her first advice.
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Last spring, I wrote about exchanging Haikus with a friend and what writing these poems daily means to me. Although I have been rigorous about adhering to the syllabic form of the Haiku,
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In this week’s On Being email, Padráig Ó Tuama said, “Every story is both a revelation and a concealment,” an insight that can be applied to my own writing
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It has started raining heavily and the winds are picking up. On one Tropical Storm Henri tracker, the arrow points directly to where I live
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Last month a friend shared with me that she had been writing a Haiku every day. A Haiku is a 3-line, 17 syllable poem. The first line is 5 syllables,
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