Is Your Writer Self Lonely, Frustrated, and Overwhelmed? Does it feel as if the demands of daily life keep pulling you away from your writing? You have to be a perfect parent, […]
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Is It Okay to Drink and Read Anne Lamott?
It seemed a fair question to ask myself, since that’s exactly what I was doing. I don’t have a clear answer, possibly due to the drink. Lamott is famous for writing […]
Why I Write
Why I Write I once took a workshop with Marge Piercy, a prolific poet and novelist who told the participants to become writers only if they could not do anything else. The […]
Flash Nonfiction “His Apple Pie”–a dog, a pie, a bad guy
I’m proud and happy to announce my flash nonfiction essay, “His Apple Pie,” about a border collie and a bad guy, appeared today in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For […]
Join Us and Add Suspense to Your Life Story
This Saturday I’m teaching a creative nonfiction workshop in which we’ll make our readers shiver. Suspense has got to be the biggest challenge to my daily work as a memoirist, but writing suspenseful prose has also […]
December: Confession
In high school I prided myself on knowing the best gossip, and later I became a journalist. The question I had to ask myself, when the time came to finally write a memoir, was how much to divulge.
Will the Real Cheryl Strayed Please Stand Up?
I watched as Cheryl went from person to person like a hummingbird gathering nectar, engaging people as though she were truly interested in them– and I’m sure she was. She told me that she asked so many questions of her mother’s friends and house guests when she was young that her mother gave her a limit of how many questions she could ask each person. What were the types of questions she asked? “Who do you love? Why do you love them?” All questions of the interior life. Imagine a five year-old engaging you in such a conversation.
Blue Canaries
My fiancé arrives home from a twelve hour shift. He left in the pre-dawn darkness, and has arrived after winter’s dusk.
“Who died?” I ask when I greet him at the door, motioning to the black band across his badge. A thin blue line on the band serves as a marker for his profession.
“The deputy in Leon Country,” he says, leaving his boots by the door. “You didn’t hear?”
“No,” I say. “What happened?”
He tells me about the fire and the ambushed deputies, and I’m reminded of the nickname firefighters have given cops–blue canaries.
September: Labor Day
Work it, Girl! All through September, the Sirens will be singing songs of labor, whether it be childbirth labor, laboring toward artistic goals, or laboring to be the best selves we can […]
Nina and the Snakeslayer
by Wendy Goddard As roommates go, Mark the Stonemason possessed many qualities to recommend him, none more crucial than his being the recipient of my friend Charlotte’s love. Mark could size up […]
The Gloria Sirens 