Were you planning on traveling this year? We were going to Chicago in June, meet up with our oldest son’s family, head down to the Henry County fair and watch the harness races for posterity and writing research; my grandfather owned the world champion harness racing horse in 1926 and…
What are your reading? Let it bleed a bit into your writing.When you run across a phrase or word you love, write it down. Then when you get stuck in your own writing, try collaging in a random phrase or word. I keep some of the beat poets handy for…
Have you ever imagined a character you’re writing, or your mother, as something you might play with, some relic from your past? I’m going through my dead mother’s artifacts when I find a youthful head shot of her, colored and cutout, like the bust of a paper doll. Back before…
The Power of Writing with Others collage by L.Lyn Greenstone Not so long ago, we used to meet at the local library, six writers and myself. I introduced a prompt and we got right to work, a short session of only five minutes, plus a minute to wrap it up.…
In making my list of 10 elements for a great day (yesterday’s post) I found myself contemplating the balance between comfort and challenge. A good day possesses them both, in unequal measure, as one bleeds into the other. Writing, for example, is both challenging and comforting. I begin with the…
Do you ever wonder why some days end on a high and others end in defeat? Today was a great day, but why? What makes for a great day? In an attempt to quantify it I made a list of my top ten elements. All are actions I can take…
A few years ago our youngest was drawing space shapes- a moon, some stars, a wobbly planet, when she looked up and said, You’re the best mom in the world. Child #6 was a late-life reckoning, born 13 years ago, when I was 47, the last thing I thought I…
“In my unresisting picture, all love seen All said is dented love’s saluted image” This line from beat poet, Bernadette Mayer, calls out to me from her book, Midwinter Day, written on the shortest day of the year; a mother with two small children wrote an entire book in one…
Why do you write? Every now and then I return to this existential question. Like Flannery O’Connor, I don’t know what I think until I write. I need to see my thoughts spelled out in words, and then I can edit them, put them in order. When I see them…
What do you do with your mother’s doll collection after she dies? No one wanted them, except my youngest daughter, but we had to fly home from Las Vegas, and she already had too many dolls for the size of our house. “You can have one box of dolls. One…