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.
For how many years now—twenty? thirty?—I’ve quoted Anne Lamott’s snarky bit of writing advice, gleaned from Bird By Bird: “You’ve got to write a shitty first draft.” I teach it to students and recite it to myself (even as I write this!) as a balm against revulsion at my mess of bad prose and half-baked
The Rough Draft Self Read More »
Despite five years of plugging away on a new book, I still feel tongue-tied whenever anyone asks me about it. Here’s my usual elevator speech: “The Release helps writers navigate the period after they finish a project with integrity, creativity, and grace.” Adequate, except the book likely will not be called The Release and most
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When I turned fifty I did a ten-day silent retreat at the Benedictine monastery at Snowmass, Colorado, an immersion in a Christian form of meditation called Centering Prayer. The retreat was hard. At 5:15 a.m., under a black bowl of stars, I trekked a quarter mile up an icy hill banked by snow, huffing from
In honor of International Women’s Day I dug back into Hannah, Delivered, my first attempt at long fiction. The plot’s shaggy, Hannah’s voice a tad cloying, her transformation predictable, and even so the pages radiate enough novice enthusiasm for the wild and wooly subculture of traditional midwifery that I keep turning pages. Hannah’s apprenticeship and
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At my daughter’s swim lesson a few years ago, an enthusiastic teacher stood hip-deep in the pool with a plastic clipboard, laminated sheet, and wax pencil. The eight-year-olds water-wheeled by, chins awkwardly raised above the surface in desperate attempts to doggy paddle their way through the crawl. As they passed he shouted, “Relax! Relax! Relax!”
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With some regularity I’m overtaken by timely, pretty-darn-good (I almost wrote “brilliant”) inspirations bursting with agency—that I don’t want to heed. The first time this happened, I’d submitted my MFA essay to the editor of my memoir, hoping she’d publish it as an afterword. “The memoir should stand on its own,” she insisted. “Why don’t
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Snow began at 8 a.m. and is coming down fast and furious. My thirteen-year-old languishes upstairs with a head cold, missing school, although I suspect the kids will be sent home before the day is up. My creative work is also at a welcome standstill, one writing text under an editor’s review and my middle-grade
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Nine p.m., Gwyn and I drive from her second Park & Rec volleyball game through the night toward home and she’s bouncing with energy. I’ve just told her how proud I am. “I know!” she enthuses. “With tennis, it took me years to be mediocre. Volleyball’s much easier. I’m already mediocre!” Thus my pride.