• Home
  • about
    • blog
      • Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer
      • #DinnerwithDragonwagon
      • Deep Feast
      • #WidowhoodWednesday
    • media: interviews / profiles / articles
    • radio / video
    • cookbooks
    • publications list
  • books
    • children’s books
    • novels / fiction
    • poetry
    • reviews of CD’s books
  • Mentoring
    • testimonials
  • contact
  • “Is that your real name?”
    • Subscribe
  • FEARLESS WRITING™ 2023

Crescent Dragonwagon

TIDINGS OF DISCOMFORT

TIDINGS OF DISCOMFORT

By Crescent Dragonwagon

Our beloved partner is no longer on earth. And now it’s the holidays. Sometimes other people, not realizing they’re doing it, ask us to dress grief up in party clothes. We may even ask it of ourselves. But we don’t have to do it. In the fall of 2004,  Richard, my friend Kay’s husband and the love of her life,… Read More

Filed Under: #WidowhoodWednesday, Fearless Living, widowhood Tagged With: grief, grieving, holiday depression, holiday grieving, holiday pressure, holidays, widow, widowhood

BLOSSOMING, NO MATTER WHAT: A CHRISTMAS (CACTUS) STORY

BLOSSOMING, NO MATTER WHAT: A CHRISTMAS (CACTUS) STORY

By Crescent Dragonwagon

SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE, IS BLOOMING. NOW.  IT MAY NOT BE THE PLANT YOU WANTED OR EXPECTED. ITS TIMING MAY BE OFF, OR ODD, OR MYSTERIOUS. BUT BEFORE YOU GIVE OVER TO  DESPAIR, — EASY, IN THESE DIFFICULT AND UNENDINGLY STRESSFUL TIMES —  LOOK FOR THE BUD, THE BLOSSOM. IF IT CAN FLOWER IMPROBABLY, SO CAN YOU. 2012 was the last full… Read More

Filed Under: Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer Tagged With: aging, aging parents, Arkansas, Charlotte Zolotow, Christmas cactus, compassion towards self and others, David Koff, death, eldercare, friendship, grief, grieving, love, memoir, memoir-writing, writing

WIDOW, WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME? AN INVITATION

WIDOW, WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME? AN INVITATION

By Crescent Dragonwagon

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

Filed Under: #WidowhoodWednesday, Conversations with Crescent Classes, Crescent Dragonwagon, Events, Fearless Living, self-understanding, personal growth, widowhood Tagged With: community, grief, grieving, the Club No One Wants to Join

A MILLION AND ONE: WHY WE TELL OUR STORY OVER & OVER

A MILLION AND ONE: WHY WE TELL OUR STORY OVER & OVER

By Crescent Dragonwagon

We are so tired of our story, so exhausted by it. We hate going over it and over it, yet we do, obsessively (one reason we feel insane, though we are not; we’ve grieving). We have exhausted all our friends, and we try not to burden them any more; they have been so good to us, they know our story…. Read More

Filed Under: Fearless Living Tagged With: grieving, narrative, storytelling. grief, Symes, widowhood, Widowhood Wednesday

GRIEF WILL NOT BE OUTSMARTED,  CERTAINLY NOT AT THE LAVINIA HOTEL

GRIEF WILL NOT BE OUTSMARTED, CERTAINLY NOT AT THE LAVINIA HOTEL

By Crescent Dragonwagon

Three months and eighteen days after Ned’s death, I took his ashes, as per his written request, to India. This was still relatively early days, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my persistent illusion: I still thought you could somehow outsmart grief. I did not yet know that when grief wants to be felt, it will find a way to… Read More

Filed Under: #WidowhoodWednesday, Fearless Living Tagged With: ashes, cremation, grief, grieving, Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka, widowhood, Widowhood Wednesday

TABLE FOR ONE

TABLE FOR ONE

By Crescent Dragonwagon

“For months after Ned’s death I barely ate. (How could I taste, let alone digest, when my sweet partner had suddenly, absolutely vanished from the earth, could never close his eyes again in ecstasy at something so simple as a perfect baked red yam or a plate of pancakes?)”  I wrote most of  Passionate Vegetarian when Ned was alive. It… Read More

Filed Under: #WidowhoodWednesday, Fearless Living Tagged With: eating vegetables, grief, grieving, widowhood, Widowhood Wednesday

HOW DO WE DEFINE OURSELVES NOW; OR, WHAT BOX AM I SUPPOSED TO CHECK?

HOW DO WE DEFINE OURSELVES NOW; OR, WHAT BOX AM I SUPPOSED TO CHECK?

By Crescent Dragonwagon

Though we spent our first anniversary in Paris, we’d honeymooned in the Ozarks, in Ponca, Arkansas, not far from where we lived. When we drove home after our days in that rustic, rubble-wall hotel on the Buffalo River, we stopped in Berryville.  For some reason I can’t recall, he needed to pick something up at a hardware store. He went… Read More

Filed Under: #WidowhoodWednesday Tagged With: grief, grieving, identity, love, widowhood

“fixing to” … and a message via indigo bunting

By Crescent Dragonwagon

The original inventers of twittering have been coming and going from the feeder all day today. Whenever I look out, from the bathroom window upstairs or the french doors in the kitchen downstairs, different visitors are at the cafe. Finches yellow as canaries, finches as reddish-purple as if they’d bathed in grape juice. Sparrows, in tweedy brown-gray-black-white. Black-caped chicadees. Grosbeaks,… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, Fearless Writing, Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer, Writing Courses Tagged With: anxiety, Arkansas, birds, change, compassion towards self and others, cornbread, Crescent dragonwagon, death, Eureka Springs, fear, Fearless Writing, grief, grief & grieving, grieving, hope, indigo bunting, love, natural world, Ned Shank, resilience, spring, Vermont, writer's memory, writers, writing, writing workshops

Read Aloud with Crescent and Mark

NOT A LITTLE MONKEY, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrted by Michelle Chessaree

"So, the little girl climbed into the big waste-basket and waited." ' Oh no,' said her mother, ' we don't want to throw you away.'"There are many ways to express love and the need for attention. Here, a busy mother and her just-a-bit naughty little girl tease each other affectionately — the little girl making her point without even uttering a word.That's today's story time — read aloud by the author's daughter at Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops, with Mark Graff's "text support" and discussion."Just right for two-to-fours, the humor of this true-to-life story of a mischievous little girl who blocks her mother's attempts to clean house will elicit giggles from the lollipop set." Kirkus Reviews

Posted by Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops on Thursday, June 4, 2020

Read Aloud with Crescent

Read Aloud with Crescent

The Washington Post on Crescent’s Lentil Soup Recipe

The Washington Post on Crescent’s Lentil Soup Recipe

Greek Lentil Soup with Spinach and Lemon, photograph by Tom McCorkle, Washington Post

Bean By Bean Cookbooks

#DeepFeast Recipes

More Posts from this Category

Dinner with Dragonwagon

More Posts from this Category

 for children:

A NAPPA Gold Winner
NAPPA


"... like a warm luminescent blanket at bedtime... softly lulling." -- New York Times


"(With) weary animals, Dragonwagon offers an “alphabet of ways to sleep,” smoothly working in some alliteration..."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Available at:

Crescent Dragonwagon page style=

read aloud with Crescent Dragonwagon

Until Just Moistened

Until Just Moistened

Available for Purchase

Copyright © 2023 · Darling theme by Restored 316