The page is a cliff. You approach it with trepidation, wary of the fall, uncertain of the distance or the landing. The solid ground of not-writing below your feet, and the sheer drop, a wave of cold air, then… nothing. How can it be a daily practice, this throwing yourself off a cliff? No wonder […]
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Such a modest, yet all-out ambition. You don’t need a bigger light, someone else’s light, a best-selling light, a more commercial light, a light that will let you quit your job, a light that outshines someone else’s light or the streetlight or the moon. You
Listen! Listen to the small sounds of the early quiet: dog lapping at the water, heater rising to greet the turning of the seasons, refrigerator’s low hum. Listen again, deeper, listen into the beat and pause of the words within you. The rhythm coming through your hand, pen to page, offers a particular pulse. But
For setting yourself racing against time, against the speed of your thoughts tumbling through, pouring in granular, perpetual motion. Go. Q is for Quixotic, for following dreams and scooping up whims, guesses, ideals, possibilities. Harnessing your attention to the wild-dog-pulled sleigh of your imagination. Go. Q is for Quilt, for piecing together disparate scraps into
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What psychedelics do according to my rudimentary layperson’s understanding of the science based on reading part of one book (consider this a disclaimer!), is suppress the control of a central part of the brain that both coordinates input from various sensory-gathering parts of the brain and also regulates the traffic of that input, preventing collisions and
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The page is the answer to all your questions, from “what happens next?” to “should I keep trying?” The page answers yes and better than yes. The page produces story, scene, character, wisdom, humor, the small scratch of life and the wide, convex horizon. The page brings out the writer. Don’t want for inspiration or
Dreaming, getting words on the page, delving into a realm you are simultaneously creating (or recreating) is a trick that involves chaos, extreme disorder. Revising is messy, too. At present, I am patching half-comprehensible signals from my unconscious into a well-worked manuscript, creating ruptures, making lumpy what was smooth, and drafty (pun intended) what was
The mean number is an average. The mean girl is an icon, the mode by which people socialized or attempting female may express power. Cutting. Exclusionary. And then there is meaning, to mean, I mean, what do you mean? So…middling, bullying or reaching for what matters? All of it: mean. This is the water we
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The edge, the in between. The beginning, a transition, a threshold. Liminal is not linear. There are worlds to cross, worlds to merge. You live in between all the demands on you, all the certainties and somedays, the what ifs that haunt our days with their absences. Your writing thrives in a liminal space, too,
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Kilter means “in good working order, aligned,” but I’ll bet you’ve never heard it without “off” or “out of” in front of it. We know when we’re off-kilter, when the world is out of kilter, but do we notice when the world is on-kilter, in kilter? Know your own kilter. Know what it feels like,
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