Language is the current that story travels on. It is the scaffolding of story. It is the engine. It needs to support the house. It needs to flow into the big waters. It needs to provide the most efficient transportation for where you want your reader to go. I taught a workshop last weekend called “Fierce on the Page” as part … Read More
Who were you before you were a writer?
Just as an acorn contains the destiny of the oak, our little pre-K or elementary-school selves knew everything we needed to know about who we are, what we love, and the lives we are best suited to live. But unlike the oak, we have a lot of influences throughout our lives that can drastically confuse the matter. By the time … Read More
The gift you give yourself
Happy holidays to you! I hope this finds you warm and well, steeped in the company and traditions that delight you most. I want to propose that we all give a very special gift to ourselves this holiday season. One that is hard to know how to identify and even harder to know how to give. Permission. Permission to be … Read More
When you are willing to follow the wrong star home
In 2007, I felt my time in Portland was complete. I planned two trips to places I felt called to — Grass Valley, CA and Maine — to investigate relocation. In Grass Valley, I met a woman who modeled for me something I needed to understand about love. And in Maine, I walked into a house I’ve been dreaming about … Read More
alive at the center
When the name of an event reaches like a sliver of light through the cracked-open door of my heart, I follow where I am led. This is how I came to attend the reading launching alive at the center, a poetry collection from Ooligan Press featuring contemporary poems from the pacific northwest. Alive at the center: that is what these past, few … Read More
Interview with Poet Carolyn Martin
I admire Carolyn Martin, and I admire her poems; they take me places. Anchored to the ground of truth, soaring into the ether of wisdom, Carolyn’s poetry invites me more deeply into myself — more expansively into the rudderless realm of the human. These poems have an authority about them that is suggestive to this reader of mountains — as … Read More
Living the dream
In Facebook, the terrain of evocative one-liners, I got a note from an old colleague saying that he and his family were “living the dream”. This phrase evokes the image for me of a snake eating its own tail. Living our dreams conflates two very different and necessary dimensions of consciousness into a single, goal-oriented trajectory. Having found dreams to … Read More
We the breeders
This week, in a curly-headed flourish of time marching on, my son turned three. This anniversary of our shared birth into the context of family has been accompanied by my interview in the We Who Are About to Breed series of We Who Are About to Die. Both have me thinking. About what it has meant to become a mother. … Read More
Secure your own mask before assisting others
The flight attendant came to our aisle to make sure we were paying attention. She signaled to Jonny–the sweet, 20-something man whose girlfriend was also gluten intolerant, whose parents are too busy to travel to see him–seated beside my son, and let him know that he should secure his own mask before assisting his child. The flight attendant who had … Read More
Thinking of you, today
I woke up this morning smelling like the perfume of the friend I hugged last night. Thinking: this is humanity, the bleed of one life into another, the carrying of each other’s stories on our bodies, in our hair. It’s been 10 years since 9/11, and I’ve been working on a piece all week that I’ll be reading this afternoon. … Read More