My dear fellow member of the Club No One Wants to Join, I started Widowhood Wednesday just under a year ago. I was almost seventeen years past my first widowhood, almost three past my second. I was accompanying (to the extent it is possible that another person can accompany another in the freshets of recent grief), my recently widowed friend… Read More
A PERSON HAS A LIFE, WITH A DEFINITE AND IRREFUTABLE BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END. BUT, WITH A BOOK IT’S NOT SO CLEAR. I spent a recent Sunday, improbably, working on an introduction to the forthcoming Chinese edition of a children’s book entitled Sleepy Book. Written in 1956 or ’57 and published in 1958, its author is Charlotte Zolotow, my late mother…. Read More
SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HOW IT’S GOING TO COME OUT. OR EVEN IF IT WILL. BUT IF YOU HANG IN THERE ANYWAY, TRANSFORMATION IS POSSIBLE. IN FACT, IT MIGHT BE ON ITS WAY TO YOU RIGHT NOW, HERE’S WHAT MY EDGY, ALCOHOLIC, WRITER FATHER – WHO LATER SOBERED UP – TAUGHT ME ABOUT THIS. About three years ago, a… Read More
Remember “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon? There’s an apocryphal story about it. Decades ago Simon was flying across country to New York with her then-back-up singer and piano player, Billy Mernit. He noticed a reflection: what was outside the plane window was mirrored in her coffee cup. He said to her offhandedly, “Look, clouds in your coffee.” Which became,… Read More
Last week, in Louisville, Kentucky, I noticed a nice-looking — okay, cute — somewhat formally dressed man, seated alone across the aisle from me on the bus. He was youngish (I’m 64, so a shocking number of people now look youngish to me). He seemed a little jittery, not quite at ease. This was the last night of the 39th Annual Conference… Read More
I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy. She heard me reading poetry between sets of a bluegrass band at a now-defunct nightclub in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. If you are silly enough to attempt such a reading, you will find your poetry greatly improved by the endeavor. The feedback is like no other: if one single phrase isn’t smacking your audience upside… Read More
At Crescent Dragonwagon’s renowned breakthrough writing workshop, you’ll find your voice. Find your juice. Cozy up to your fears and get rock-solid about how to use them. Get jazzed and energized even in these most uncertain of times. Write, and surprise yourself doing it. Unlike workshops where the glow lasts only as long as the workshop, you’ll leave with lasting self-mentoring skills and strengthened resilience. As you experience how Fearless works, you’ll be better able to walk through the difficulties and setbacks inherent in writing — and in life. Featured in O Magazine, Fearless offers powerful assistance to writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to learn how to stop driving with the emergency brake on. Some take the workshop to improve their writing itself, or to make doing it less angst-y. Others take it for the fearlessness, using writing as a process and tool, a way to break… Read More
Crescent Dragonwagon presents an evening together, Procrastination, Toasted, Write Now, Don’t Wait Another Four Years. A one evening online course for writers and want to be writers. This delightful experience will feature Crescent sharing processes to overcome procrastination and develop your practice of writing and fear of failure as a writer. The creator of Fearless Writing ™ as featured in… Read More
Quick, think of your favorite musician. Bonnie Raitt? Yo-Yo Ma? Doesn’t matter. John Coltrane? Lady Gaga? Eric Clapton? Youssou N’Dour? Doesn’t matter. Dolly Parton, Mirian McPartland, Howlin’ Wolf, Luciano Pavarotti? Still doesn’t matter. Because whoever he or she is, he or she did (and, if alive, still does) three things that anyone, who is good at anything, does. Those three things:… Read More
This is the way it works. You return to a town where you used to live. You go on a short walk, on a street you have walked many times. You are only stretching your back and legs and getting a few more steps in so your Fitbit will be happy at the end of the day. You are only… Read More
It's 9:24 a.m. I have to leave at 10:00 to drive a deeply depressed friend to her therapy appointment. I am in the middle of writing one of my long, thoughtful, typical essay-type posts, which my friend Ronni Lundy calls "blongs." I left it, and began writing this instead. I have a bowl of Irish oatmeal beside me, cooked with… Read More
…that particular morning, that little girl in Atlanta did have a question. A real question, and, as I have said, she asked it with solemnity and gravitas. Her manner made me wonder later if she, literal as all children are, had perhaps been puzzling over it for weeks, as I remember puzzling over why “witches” were in the Pledge of Allegiance. (“And to the Republic, for witches stand…”)
“Do you believe,” that little girl asked me, “that it’s true that you really can’t judge a book by its cover?”
