Love Matters Most: My Latest Writing Credo
Love is literature’s essential ingredient. If we writers can center ourselves in our love—for the subject matter, for the writing process, for the language, for the readers—then we’ve got it made.
Creativity
Containing Land & Spirit
How can we contain rather than squander the gifts we’re showered with? How can we nurture our gifts so they thrive?
Reading and Writing–For the Love of It
Perhaps we writers love to write because we love loving, and we intuit that writing exercises this capacity.
Writing and Forgiveness
Forgiving ourselves and proceeding regardless is a fundamental part of living fully, and writing well.
Why I Write, Part 2: Because it’s worthwhile.
What’s the real value of our writing? Others may answer this differently, but here is my take: Does the act of writing help you come more alive? Then it’s valuable. Does your writing help even one other reader come more alive? Then it’s valuable.
Moral writing? Uncool, but bring it on!
If moral writing is “unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love,” bring it on!
In Dialogue
We can be in dialogue with our whole being, accepting what life makes of us, taking what has happened, and making of it something new. From this dynamic exchange comes aliveness—our own and the world’s.
Broken & Beautiful: How the Light Gets In
The funny thing is that, wrong as we are, we do belong here, and wrong as our work may be, it belongs as well. Everything is cracked, and everything is beautiful.
Paper Doll Spirituality
I thought of her over the long weekend without me, pouring all her energy into this paper representation of our family; I imagined her bent over the dining room table, making her passionate “I love you—I love you—I love you” into little flat people she could give hair-dos and tenderly clothe, and I saw finally how we’d each in our own ways been praying all weekend, placing our hearts into this vast, connected, and holy family.
Undoing the Single Story
Revision insists that we reject the single story in favor of layered, complex, and contradictory stories. Just as intimacy and awareness break down our stereotypes, intimacy with and awareness of our material break apart our over-simplifications and half-truths.