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Some thoughts on writing and reading, to ways to help homeless animals. Because how we treat the vulnerable among us matters.
Dispatches from my Cat Life
He’s gone, but always here
Who rescues whom
If you love animals and/or want to help them, you will immediately learn several phrases that sound like slogans but offer certain guidelines:
Welcome.
I have been a working writer (and teacher) for over 20 years, and in that time, I’ve come to believe that a writing life is uniquely structured to transform the soul. It will not give you the glib and easy surface of #blessed on Instagram but, if you clear space for it, writing (and its Siamese twin reading) will keep you forever curious and interested. And if that’s not the recipe for a good life then what is?
The Life Your Writing Leads
I first encountered the above James Baldwin quote as the epigraph of Dorothy Allison’s searing debut novel Bastard out of Carolina. Allison’s novel will certainly stay with you (the line “What’s a South Carolina virgin? ‘At’s a ten-year-old can run fast,” has etched itself into my bones), but it was the Baldwin that became my clarion call.
NaNoWriMo Week Four: How Novels Are Lived
Week four is the hardest part of this challenge. Excitement and buzz have worn off and the ending still feels miles away and possibly even pointless. And yet here it is: Everything now reduced to did I hit my goals or not. That’s why I like to tailor NaNoWriMo with my students so that it’s not only a 50,000 words do or die.
NaNoWriMo Week Three: Detours, Plots, and a Poem
I’d planned spend the 3rd week of November talking about plot and conflict. Or plot and meaning. Or plot and purpose. But definitely plot. And then two things happened: one of my students wanted to quit and I had to abandon over 50,000 words of a passion project. My student wasn’t having any fun with NaNoWriMo, her manuscript didn’t make any sense, and it all seems pointless.
NaNoWriMo Week Two: If the House is on Fire and a Poem
When I was young, my father used to say that the Devil is in the details. I went to college in North Carolina, where the expression was that God is in the details. Whoever is in there, details are important. Why else would supernatural beings reside in them?
NaNoWriMo Week One: Questions and a Poem
Even if you are using this month to revise a finished draft, you can’t go wrong by starting with point of view. As you sit down to write over the next few days, ask yourself: Day One: Who is telling this story? Day Two: Why are they telling it? Day Three: When are they telling it?
When Lonely, Find What is Solitary
As COVID drags into its tenth month on the West Coast, we all feel like experts on the ways that solitude and loneliness shape us. They’ve been my travelling companions for many a year and I think we should celebrate them. But with the added caveat that both states are different for everyone and I’m only offering up the way I’ve made my peace with them.
Is Time a Friend or Foe?
After classes end, people often contact me saying they are having trouble finding time to write. Do I have any suggestions how they can do better? As a rule, I am against the how-to approach to writing because what makes the work sacred is how personal it is.
Notes on Why
As I write children’s books, yet read widely outside the genre, and, by passionate choice don’t have children, Why do you do this comes up a lot. How I respond depends on who is asking (and how). My students always merit answers about voice, point of view and the young protagonist as the ultimate outsider in a world created by adults.
My Cathedral: Notes from a Bookish Life
I started teaching for the same reasons that someone joins a convent or becomes a priest; to share a transcendent faith. Not the kind you may be picturing, however, for this church is built on how writing transforms the soul. In the classroom, I open the doors to my cathedral, and we all learn more about why we write, read, and live.