My Work

November 1, 2017

“You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up some day and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories, visions and songs. Your truths, your version of things in your own voice.” ~ Anne Lamott

Among the excess and the overwhelming on the Internet, there are calm, quiet places if I look for them. A quote that puts words to an experience I can’t yet find words to, an article that takes the words right out of my mouth, or poems that remind me of things I continue to forget. It was in one of these places where I was introduced to a poem that I need to read regularly.

What's Well Worth Losing

February 28, 2017

I love the sounds in a coffee shop. Two men next to me in quiet conversation. Bjork unobtrusively singing out of the speakers and the milk-foamer giving off occasional bursts that sound like a television gone fuzzy. A woman laughing across the room at a joke I didn’t hear. All this company and, except for the occasional chat with other regulars, I don’t talk to anyone.

I came here to write about intimacy. I don’t know if being here is intimacy, but it is enough connection to cut the edge off the bleakness that often comes at this time of the year, after the winter silence turns stale. This proximity to others, even those who I don’t know, gives me the right amount of distraction from myself to start writing.

Get to Know Loneliness

May 18, 2016

Writing is lonely. It is quiet, except for maybe the sound of keys clicking away or the soft scratch of a pencil on paper. But, when a writer realizes that they need to write, it doesn't come from a place of silence. We write because our mind is so loud and unruly that something has got to give. If there was any other way to sustain ourselves, we would probably choose it. Writing is a last resort.

To write, we need to be alone. We need to know how to move beyond the distraction of the chatty women in the coffee shop, the unmade bed in our room, and write. We need to be so interested in this aloneness that we build our lives around it. What is so scary about being not-so-close to people? I don’t mean we have to get rid of all people, things, and outings in our life. It is also not to say that we don’t want to be heard, eventually. We all want to be heard. We just have to say something first.

Most of Writing is Falling in Love

April 5, 2016

Most of writing is falling in love. That big wide opening of maybe just three words that coax you into following anywhere in the entire universe.Trust. You will be carried and no doubt, you will be dropped. Don't care. Fall in love again. Even if it’s just for a word or a sentence or if we’re lucky, a short story and if we’re crazy maybe something bigger. Don’t worry about getting married, get in love. Blahness will come out of your writing if you’re not in wild abandonment. Be ruthless. Love the story and be head over heels for words. Write them how they want to be written, not how they’ve been written before.

Reading: Where Grace Meets Narcissism

March 16, 2016

Having a good book in my hands is like putting ground under my feet. Perhaps to some, reading is seen as a way of escaping or of disengaging with the world but for me, it is a way of engaging as completely as I possibly can. Reading is an act of trust, artistic expression, and connecting to a world entirely outside our own perspective.

A story can collapse time and space and connect us to people, societies and experiences that we have never known. In an article titled "Don't Turn Away from the Art of Life", Arnold Weinstein says "We enter the bookstore, see the many volumes arrayed there, and think: so much to read, so little time. But books do not take time; they give time, they expand our resources of both heart and mind. It may sound paradoxical, but they are, in the last analysis, scientific, for they trace the far-flung route by which we come to understand our world and ourselves. They take our measure."

Show Up

February 25, 2016

Show up. Whatever you do. Show up. You don’t have to be out of your pajamas or even out of your bed. Put your pen to paper or your fingers to the keys and start. Open to something beyond your cotton flannel striped sheets that you should have changed weeks ago and write. It’s there. It’s always there. Somewhere along the lines, we were told that daydreaming is a waste of time, a liability, a hazard but we still can’t seem to shut it up. Daydream on paper. Dream big on big white sheets of nothing. Don’t feel guilty about spending your whole day whittling away at a story, if we’re lucky enough to ever have a full day to write. There is nothing more important. Except people. Don’t forget people. Stories aren’t created in a vacuum.