Let’s tinker in the guts of books! Welcome to Part 1 of a series called Gears & Ghosts, in which I cozy up with a stack of novels and figure out how they work, like a curious mechanic poking around various well designed haunted house rides. If you’re wondering why anyone would want to do this, …
tl;dr A few recent podcasts where I share some (hopefully useful) thoughts on writing, publishing, and the creative process. ✶ ✷ ✵ ✸ ✹ Hello, friends 🕺🏼 ✹✸✵✷✶ I’ve been aspiring to a hushed autumn. Social media silence. A daily round that turns down the volume on the (beautiful but busy) spring/summer. It occurred to me, …
I was sitting in the back row of ninth-grade math class and passing notes with my friend Rob, who liked Pearl Jam as much as I did. Rob and I were not exactly troublemakers but we were also definitely not Cool Kids and school was just so stupid and we were sort of mischievous. So …
I have observed: The raising of both novels and toddlers involves urgency and mess. Both yell cryptic phrases at you, which they expect you to decipher and translate to the rest of the world. Both involve days of difficult, unpaid work that is, for years, invisible to the rest of the world. Also: Both will …
Sine proprio. It means “without grasping.” It’s Latin, a phrase used in the vows taken by Franciscan friars—or that’s what I learned from my friar friend, anyway. Specifically, sine proprio is the phrase used for the vow of Poverty. I would’ve thought they’d use a phrase like “without money” for a vow of poverty. But the point …
“Tell me what you’ve been thinking about lately,” I said to my husband. (This is—a friend pointed out to me recently—a classic June question. I like to hear people’s deep thoughts: what they’re wrestling with, who and what they love, what they’ve always wanted to do with their lives. You’d be amazed how deep you …
I’ve started brewing poems lately, after a long time of not. A bit about this one: For many years, I’ve been drawn to a character named Mad Maudlin, who appears in 17th and 18th century Bedlamite ballads. She was the female counterpart to a “Mad Tom o’Bedlam” character, the catch-all term for asylum inmates released …