Goodness Gracious
All creative work is becoming; it is more alive or less alive, and our job as artists is to nurture life.
writing
Liberating Stories
We jam our experiences into a box and come to love that box, but the work of writing—the work of evolving—requires unpacking the box and building a new one, perhaps a bit more fitting, and then discovering a cloth bag works better, and finally realizing that all these containers are marvelous but incapable of holding the true glory which is our story.
Liberating Stories Read More »
Play with Me!
Without carving space between and within our necessary activities to engage the world spontaneously, for its own sake, there’s no life-spark. Play is how we come spiritually alive.
Enduring the Discomfort of Writing
A writer’s capacity to tolerate discomfort, along with violent busts of elation and anguish, determines how deeply and for how long he or she can reside in the generative state.
Enduring the Discomfort of Writing Read More »
Writing as Deep Listening
Every story has a hidden life—a soul, if you will. How writers tend this soul significantly affects our work and our well-being. This tending is really active listening. It’s both willful, sprung from the self, and responsive, heeding that life-force beyond the story and its readership.
Writing as Deep Listening Read More »
Walking On Air
But this is our progression when learning an art, and (I suspect) when living life: First we’re unconscious, then we’re self-conscious, and then we’re aware of being self-conscious, which is truly agonizing. Only then can we come into consciousness and make conscious choices that shape our lives.
Message from the Page: “Would you please pay attention?!”
Contemplation is our central task as writers, and as human beings.
Message from the Page: “Would you please pay attention?!” Read More »
The Democratic Nature of Writing
If genuine, open-hearted engagement is the basic ingredient of the creative process, then we all have the capacity to move a reader.
The Democratic Nature of Writing Read More »
Marty’s Gift: Better than Publication
Never have I read a recovery memoir that was so ripping hilarious, emotionally astute, and theologically provocative. Marty was a fantastic writer. He worked on that tome (three volumes long!) for as long as I knew him—over a decade. It was one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever supported.
Marty’s Gift: Better than Publication Read More »
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.
Love Matters Most: My Latest Writing Credo Read More »