Hiring the Journal Keeper (and/or the Writer Within)

Posted on by October 18, 2018

  …the heart…and the learned skills of the conscious mind… make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook Whether you are someone who sets out to write poems, essays, stories or articles or keeps journals, the thinking and analogy I make in this excerpt from … Continue reading →

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From The Writer’s Portable Mentor: What About Self-Publishing?

Posted on by October 11, 2018

Essayist, nonfiction author and poet Priscilla Long has given me permission to share an excerpt from her recently released new edition of her already classic book for writers, The Writer’s Portable Mentor. All of Priscilla’s advice is clear and sound. I am grateful for the opportunity to share some of her thinking with Writing It … Continue reading →

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Double Issue: Writing Exercises to Inspire You to Write

Posted on by September 27, 2018

Here is a collection of writing ideas to keep you going for days as our schedules start to fill with fall commitments and shorter daylight. Let the Seasons’ Personas Inspire You to Write It’s the change of seasons now. Some of us feel crisp, chilly air as September wanes. Others of us may find other … Continue reading →

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The Change in the Trees, How Strong the Wind is Blowing

Posted on by September 20, 2018

As I update an earlier book of mine, A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery, I will be sharing some of my favorite writing exercises with you over the next few weeks. Here’s the first of several lessons I am enjoying revisiting: A Lesson From Morrie and Rilke Many of us have read Tuesdays … Continue reading →

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The Light Had Been Shining

Posted on by September 13, 2018

When I was in third grade, my teacher asked me to write a Chanukah play to be presented along with a Christmas play for the kids in my class. I am not sure how she identified me as a writer. Perhaps we wrote stories for class and she liked mine. How did I even know … Continue reading →

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Moving an Essay Toward Completion — Pam Robinson’s “Table of Plenty”

Posted on by September 6, 2018

Pam Robinson’s entry into the fall 2011 Writing It Real contest is an essay about her memories of her mother’s cooking and life on a farm. As I spend time harvesting onions, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, various beans, Asian pears and soon apples and second crop radishes from my own garden, I resonate with the harvest … Continue reading →

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On Labor Day: What Writers Might Celebrate About Their Vocation

Posted on by August 30, 2018

The first Labor Day was celebrated by some on September 5, 1882, when Knights of Labor leader Peter J. McGuire requested that the first Monday in September be a day of rest for American workers. A parade in New York City’s Union Square honored the working people of America. Thousands took the day off to … Continue reading →

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Prose Poetry in a Smoky Time

Posted on by August 24, 2018

I was sitting at my dining table this morning with a cup of coffee looking out over the still smoky and haze-ridden sky we had experienced on the Olympic Peninsula for a week because of fires in Eastern Washington and in British Columbia. Sometimes we couldn’t see the islands so close to our shores here … Continue reading →

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To Love the World and Let the World Love You: August Advice for Writing Poetry

Posted on by August 16, 2018

August is the Gregorian calendar month named after the Roman Augustus Caesar, the man responsible for spreading the Roman Empire over the earth. He wrote about his great accomplishments, writings some think of as the typical age-old boastings of a politician. However, others wrote after his death that upon innumerable occasions he donated money to … Continue reading →

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Nahid Rachlin on Her Writing With Generous Excerpts from Her Memoir

Posted on by August 9, 2018

This past weekend, I was in conversation with fiction writer and memoirist Nahid Rachlin about her books and writing career. for my radio show on KPTZ “In Conversation: Discussions on Writing and the Writing Life.” It had been over a decade since she and I had last held an interview, printed in The Writer’s Chronicle … Continue reading →

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Stay in the Physical World: How Using Sensory Detail Builds the Inner Story

Posted on by August 2, 2018

Creative writing requires that we create experience through our words. We can’t just say a day was amazing, or it was depressing, or that a character felt ecstatic about something without our readers becoming disengaged. If we do that we have created distance between ourselves as writers and our material and, eventually, between the story … Continue reading →

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Patricia Hampl, My To-do List and Fiddler on the Roof

Posted on by July 26, 2018

I am so enjoying reading Patricia Hampl’s The Art of the Wasted Day. Early in the book, page 18, she records one of her many to-do lists. She says first that she admires Montaigne, know as the father of the personal essay, for his ability to be rather than strive. He didn’t think of himself … Continue reading →

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It’s Not that You Make Things Up — You Notice Things, Patricia Hampl in “Timelessness”

Posted on by July 19, 2018

It’s summer, oh, those lazy days. When was the last time you had one of those lazy days? If you are lucky, there were one or more of them and not too long ago. But with the political turmoil in our country, the social networking scene, most of us working and/or volunteering, family needs, home … Continue reading →

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