Well, friends, my decades-long obsession with revision has reached a new extreme. I’ve shamelessly messed with another author’s work. Is this even allowed? When my mother died, her study group was preparing to read Teilhard’s Divine Milieu. I picked up her beat-up paperback copy just as I began a two-year formation program in contemplative Christianity. One day my teachers …
A few years ago I submitted an essay to an anthology of queer Minnesotan writing. I called it “Wearing Bi-Focals” because it explored bisexuality as a lens much as my progressive lenses help my eyes integrate what’s near with what’s far. I sent the essay out and promptly forgot about it. Six months later the …
Years ago I coached a Buddhist priest in the development of his memoir. Unlike most beginners, Sensei V (as I’ll Christen him) cranked out a crummy but exceedingly workable rough draft in no time flat. Plagued by none of the usual hang-ups (self doubt, insecurity about “not being a real writer,” despair at how terrible his writing …
Perhaps because my first big writing project gave me room to articulate my sexual longings, come out bisexual, and figure out the implications for my Christian faith; perhaps because I’m drawn to spiritual and therefore intimate subjects, my first drafts (and often second and third) I tend to write for no one but me. Of course …
Twenty-five years ago, I met a woman in the Loft mentor series whose feedback was superb and whose prose I adored. When she mentioned her writing group, I was so overcome with envy I blurted, “Any chance you’re taking new members?” Sure enough, someone was leaving and I was most welcome. Two and a half decades later, …
As I write, Gwyn’s at the piano practicing a Beethoven Sonata, repeating trills, stumbling on scales, figuring out fingering. Distracting as her mistakes are, I find myself amazed that, after ten years of parental supervision, Gwyn is finally capable of cultivating for herself the joy of puzzling out a piece. Gwyn’s not naturally talented, but …
My family occasionally prays down by the Mississippi River with the Nibi walkers, a group of Indigenous women and other water-tenders. Water is life, so we plant our feet in the sand and offer thanks. One morning, the Anishinaabe elder Sharon Day translated her prayer for us: “Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, have pity on us.” …
As a serious practitioner and teacher of one art form—writing—I don’t often share that I also play piano. Actually, I keep it secret. Why say anything when there’s no way in hell I’ll ever perform for you? I started taking lessons at age seven, two years before I began writing, and studied it relatively seriously, …
This July, my fourteen-year-old daughter, who’s bug- and sun-adverse, who is obsessed with fancy hotels and delights in a mug that proclaims “I love not camping,” spent ten days hauling fifty pounds on her back through the Big Horn Mountains. Gwyn endured nose bleeds, boulder fields, and rehydrated textured vegetable protein. On good days she …
These glorious summer mornings, I grab my cereal bowl and head out first thing for garden strawberries, blueberries, and, dripping from the brambles, raspberries like red wine. The sun heats my neck, the chilly breeze raises my hairs, the exuberant sparrows greet me, and I snack right there, bursts of pungent sweet obliterating all else. …