The other day I stumbled onto an old Google Talk conversation with a friend, from about a year ago. The conversation went something like this: Friend: I lurked at the Tweetspeak Twitter party last night. Me: I can’t do the Tweetspeak. Too confusing. Friend: I was lost. I’m too literal. Me: L.L. tagged me on […]
Ordinary Genius: Book Club Announcement
You could say I’m playing around with writing a sonnet today, as long as your definition of “playing around” is broad enough to include tapping aimlessly on my desk to The Guess Who’s Bus Rider. Our Canadian columnist Matthew Kreider loaned me one of his famous Ticonderoga pencils this weekend. It keeps a terrific desktop 70s beat, […]
Bored by Your Apps? There’s an Oprah Book App for That
Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago at the Midwest Writers Workshop, I was fortunate to work with Kathleen Rooney, an extraordinary poetry teacher. This literary superhero somehow got each member of her workshop to produce and/or revise about a half dozen poems in just as many hours. She also spoke on writing memoirs and getting published […]
The Anthologist: Motion
I found Paul Chowder at the Tip O’Neill building. He was in the passport office cajoling the bureaucrats into renewing his travel documents just days before his departure to Switzerland for some big international poetry doings because he didn’t realize he’d expired. I was there for my once-a-decade passport renewal even though I had no […]
The Anthologist: Pluck the Day
I scheduled a date with Paul Chowder on Friday. We were supposed to hang out and talk about Sara Teasdale. He’d been going on about how some poets spend too much time thinking about death, like going to a movie and just waiting for the credits, which my dad taught me are very interesting if you […]
The Anthologist: Conversation in a Laundromat
I moved upstairs to the kitchen to work. I don’t like the kitchen much. It reminds me of all the times I have to cook, and cooking is not something I enjoy. Sometimes when I cook, there’s a fire, and I’m not sure the fire extinguisher was recharged after the last one. It wasn’t my […]
The Anthologist: Book Club Invitation
Paul Chowder is a lonely writer who would have an anthology of poetry to his credit, if he could just get the introduction written and submitted to his editor. It seems, however, that this self-proclaimed “study in failure” cannot. His longtime girlfriend has left him and he is alone in the barn, trying to write […]
The Artist’s Way: Conclusion
The Artist’s Way: If growth “is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, ” we don’t need to eat a whole carp in a day.
The Artist’s Way: Process
Says Cameron in The Artist’s Way, “creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment, we are timeless.”
The Artist’s Way: Risk
When my parents brought me to the emergency room for the second time in as many weeks, they worried that, even in the 1960s, my sudden susceptibility to injury might raise suspicions of mistreatment. I already wore Raggedy Ann-like black stitches on my face after a mishap involving a swivel chair, coffee table and locked […]
The Artist’s Way: Morning Pages
At the root of a successful recovery is the commitment to puncture our denial, to stop saying, “It’s okay” when in fact it’s something else. The morning pages press us to answer what else.
The Artist’s Way: Currents
She requires a choice with every chapter. Will I sit with the pelicans and snag the easy fish, or let the current take me clear to the ocean?
The Artist’s Way: Safety
One of our chief needs as creative beings is support. Unfortunately, this can be hard to come by.
The Artist’s Way: Invitation
The Artist’s Way is an “into-the-water” book that has helped readers move from “the embankment into the flow of a creative life.”
Rumors of Water: Time
What really happened on the golf course that fateful day? The things we cannot write about today, we will surely find we can write about tomorrow.
Rumors of Water: A Small Audience
The key to getting published is to keep working with small audiences, while gradually making forays into slightly larger arenas.
Rumors of Water: Play
With Spring coming into full bloom, I’m still doing all the same serious things I did all winter long. But I get up a little earlier and I read a poem (or two) every day.
Rumors of Water: Voice
Perhaps cultivating a writer’s voice can be more about nourishing those things that give life to it: passions and a sense of place.
Rumors of Water: The Ingredients at Hand
Of all the gifts Rumors of Water will give a writer, an excuse is not one.
Rumors of Water Book Club
Join our thoughtful and amusing senior editor, for this book club on Rumors of Water.