The year my kids started kindergarten was the same year our school added K – 3rd grades to its 4th – 8th, and so all the lower grades started together. For three years, my kids moved in a cohort with the grade above them. They were a tight-knit, unified learning community. We loved our parent […]
Learning/ Community Read More »
I have a friend who teaches the fourth grade, and just from the way her voice sounds on the phone when she talks about her day, I can tell she’s a wonderful teacher. Yesterday she told me about three “sentence frames” that she gave to her room of nine-year-olds to use in talking about writing.
And How Will This Be Helpful to a Writer? Read More »
“Mom, do you think in my life span we’ll ever meet an alien?” It’s early morning, the time when I write and then meditate, which probably brings to mind white honeycomb candles, a certain hushed peace. This is not always, or even often, the case. I’ve got a dog curled solid on my lap, serving
I have active library cards in four counties. Last week, if you’d wandered into the Sebastopol Branch of the Sonoma County Library, you would have found me kneeling as if in prayer before the junior graphic novels section, searching not my heart but the shelves as earnestly as any pilgrim. My kids are obsessed with
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
How to Kill Your Darlings without Killing Your Loved Ones Read More »
Revision and Deadlines Revision is hard to teach. It’s so easy to read and comment on someone else’s manuscript, but then the writer has to re-enter the work and read it along with me, in the form of my notes, and see my questions. Then they must turn to their own authority, their own sense
What You Need to Know About Revision and Deadlines Read More »
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
Doors Open–and Why I Take Classes Read More »
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
What Writers Need: 3 Keys to Success Read More »
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
Paying Attention: A Writer’s Breath Read More »
“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
Commitment to Write Read More »
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