In my own writing and reading I’ve recently been interested in the mythologizing of personal stories: enlarging metaphors and themes to blend truth and existing folklore with newly created heroes and villains. It seems that sometimes, the only way to get at a story so big you can’t see the whole thing is to write…
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I heard this beautiful poem by David Allen Sullivan on the Writer’s Almanac the other week. It is everything to grant oneself permission aloud, even if temporarily–to not be your absolute model best self at every turn. Shake off the burden of the unnecessary, of what you can release that will cause no one else…
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Forgive me, I am tired. But I want to put this prompt–or rather this continuation of our last prompt–out into the world. First of all, go read this I want you to take a photograph or a mental image of an ordinary, happy day in your life that maybe wasn’t particularly momentous–the kind of photograph…
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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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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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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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