Newest Posts
Why an ebook of One Year of Writing and Healing?
I am delighted to announce that One Year of Writing and Healing is now an ebook! I’ve completed a project which I’ve been intending to complete for a while: an ebook of the book I self-published back in 2016: One Year of Writing and Healing. It’s revised a bit—I couldn’t resist—but it is not fundamentally different from the 2016 book and thus I am not labeling it as a new edition. One way to think about the book is as a kind of extended workshop on writing and healing...
The Cure by Andrea Barrett
I have found a cure cottage come to life in a piece of fiction. Everything, thinks Elizabeth, is in order. Ms. Barrett continues: Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining...
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
This is the world I want to live in. Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. I’m rereading the beginning of this poem now, and I know how it ends—and I realize this is the moment that sets the story of the poem in motion. The speaker...
Prayer for Joy by Stuart Kestenbaum
I love that Kestenbaum’s poem begins with a question: What was it we wanted to say anyhow? There’s so much we could say, and perhaps there’s something ready to emerge—be spoken—but what was it exactly? What word or string of words out of all the ones we’ve learned? There’s so often some external condition to consider—to remind us—something happening in the world. In the case of this poem, a bowl of alphabet soup! And the letter J floating up to the surface—that letter so often neglected and thus surprising. Kestenbaum writes: The...
Writing Prompts at Twitter
So it occurs–and I’m by no means the first to have this thought–that Twitter, with its short format, could be another useful way to offer writing prompts for this whole process and project of writing and healing. With this in mind, here is my first experiment in offering writing prompts on Twitter. New writing prompts will appear twice a day. Writing prompts as a way to create a kind of miniature writing retreat? The writing ideas here are influenced by several writers, including Herman Melville, Andrea Barrett, Tim O’Brien, Wallace Stevens, Naomi...
It’s a book!
I am delighted to announce that One Year of Writing and Healing is now a book! The book offers a quieter, more cohesive way to work, step by step, month by month, with writing and healing. It also offers a lot of new material. If you’re interested in taking on writing and healing as a project, this book might just be the perfect way to launch it. You can order the book here. Perhaps you’d like to explore a sample of OYWH before deciding? Download a PDF of the first chapter: Months 1&2...