Elizabeth

“A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.” Don Roff This morning I remembered my own advice to my students: Write badly. You’ve heard it before (famously, Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts), but have you ever tried? Really tried? Do your best to do your worst. Guess what? It’s […]

We came home and exploded across the house—library manga, art supplies, laundry, dishes, groceries, leftover bits of food, the dog’s disintegrating toy. I thought entropy was the move toward disorder, the necessary unraveling, though in All the Light We Cannot See it’s given just as a measure of disorder’s degree. Each item overwhelms me. Scotch

My first book was published by a prestigious New York publisher (FSG) when I was twenty-eight years old. I’d always loved teaching, and was already teaching at community colleges and privately. Instantly, I became a mentor. I taught a group of women mostly twenty to thirty years older than I was, a group that included

There are three key elements I would venture to say you must engage to be a writer, to produce your creative body of work, your stories, your book, and to find your voice in the world. First, you must write. You must—by reading primarily, and through community if you are able—put yourself in the company

I’ve been listening to guided meditations lately as part of my morning writing and meditation practice, and it’s led me to a more subtle understanding of the idea of following your breath. Every time I hear that phrase — “follow your breath” — I find myself forcing air into my lungs, creating a visible, tangible

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.” ―William Hutchison Murray One time my sister and a friend were having a really hard time scheduling a lunch date. At this time one had a conflict, at that time another had prior plans. Finally they decided to have lunch together

In the morning yesterday on the playground after the bell rang for the start of school, my kids’ teacher said to me, “I’m letting them play. They love to play.” She said, “I realize watching them how we’ve stopped playing, as if we’ve forgotten how. But they just begin, immediately.” Around us an improvisation of

This year I’ve been teaching my way through seven key story steps by finding examples in memoirs, novels and stories to serve as models for our own projects—mine and my students’ books and stories. I’ve read the books I draw from, of course—Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot

“The more important a call to action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.” Steven Pressfield My kids still resist bathing. We’ve made certain days

Writing about writing in cars from last week’s post reminded me about bathroom readers. When I was twenty-one, I lived for a summer in a household of young farmers and other folks recently graduated from college. I was trying to be a writer. I had several stories I was working on, and I began to