Writing and Forgiveness
Forgiving ourselves and proceeding regardless is a fundamental part of living fully, and writing well.
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Creativity
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.
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Moral writing? Uncool, but bring it on!
If moral writing is “unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love,” bring it on!
Moral writing? Uncool, but bring it on! Read More »
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.
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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.
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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.
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Permission for Privacy
Because of Robinson’s vast permission to explore what she wills however she wills, she’s creating literature that ministers to a profound and very contemporary thirst—for grace, for beauty, for kindness. She teaches me that those hidden, peculiar, contrary motivations that rise up when I’m given solitude are even more worthy than I thought.
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Creative Rest
All writers know the magic of putting aside a problematic passage (for a nap or a walk) only to have the solution appear unbidden. This turning away from writing is, paradoxically, an essential part of writing.
Feeling like a Fraud–or Not
I’ve been bowled over by how many people have shared with me that they feel like frauds. It plagues artists, for whom there’s always some level of public recognition to strive for that might finally affirm our worth; it plagues leaders, who must stand in front of people who will inevitably question their authority; it plagues parents, who feel they should know what they’re doing and don’t. Is there anyone who doesn’t at some point feel fraudulent?!
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