When you have done what you can—no question of whether it is enough, there will come a time when it does not matter. When the water stills and you are invisible you will wander and marvel again: at the patterns of the carpet, oil in puddles, the scar on your mother’s hand the fact of…
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Veteran’s Day elicits a lot of mixed emotional responses from the Veterans I know. It’s one of those areas where I don’t have the life experience to have a genuinely informed opinion, and being a person who speaks with authority on things I don’t understand is something I work to avoid (because I am naturally prone to get…
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The sadness nearly got me this week. That’s a lie. It did get me and it shook me. It still has me. None of it is officially my own. Some of the people I love and work closely with, people who make my life more beautiful and bearable, are suffering. People I have lost love…
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This weekend I was asked, “Why do you care? Why do you care whether someone spends the weekend wallowing in their barracks room or eats dinner or sleeps or feels like shit? Why do you care?” It wasn’t a jerk question. It was real talk. And my answer was real–that I care about people who…
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It’s National Novel Writing Month. If you recall, I failed terribly at it last year. I was trying to write a novel in which my protagonist, a woman in her thirties, has a few months to say goodbye to her dying father. I spent the first ten thousand words avoiding bringing the father into the…
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This week the generous and talented Patricia Garfinkel shared her wisdom, process and a deceptively simple prompt with the writing group in Bethesda. She gave us five words, which we were to work into a poem, sentence, or paragraph. It was so loose, people approached in all these different ways that were suited to their particular…
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Last week Jimmy Santiago Baca led some incredible workshops in the NCR about–well, about everything–but mostly about individual voice. He asked us to imagine an audience of the people we are most comfortable with and then speak directly to them in our writing. It was a gift, because I do think a lot of us…
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I spent the weekend at the TLA Network’s Power of Words Conference at Pendle Hill Retreat Center outside of Philadelphia. I was so completely drowning in work and life leading up to it, I didn’t have time to look at the conference schedule or think about what I hoped to get out of the conference.…
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It was a super busy, exhausting, incredible, art-filled week and I took notes on myriad little bits of inspiration continuously. The culminating exhibit and reading was unreal–the kind of evening you want to put into a bottle and sip from on darker days. I’ve been meaning to post more, but I’m in a bit of…
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Twelve years ago, I was a stay at home mom and a part time college student. I was out painting on the back porch with my toddler, living the isolated life of the American mother. My husband called and told me to turn on the television. Soon after, I did the only thing I could…
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