Writing About Pain
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.
A Lost Art
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.”
Knitting
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.
Nonets for my Grandmother
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).
Time Management: Subtraction.
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.
Get a Notebook.
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.
Following the Rules
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,
Creating a Story
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
