I was breathless. I darted barefoot across the length of my mother’s kitchen on the second floor of the creaky hundred-year-old farmhouse, bumping around chairs and pushing off the harsh edge of the table top as I cut a vee through the pungent scent of the morning’s coffee and burnt toast. The chilly floor was […]
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Write Now
Do you put pressure on yourself to produce X number of pages or X number of words per day? When you fail, do you beat yourself up? It’s no wonder. Writers are constantly being directed to produce, produce, produce! Never mind the quality. Just spit it out! Quantity is what they want. Preferably 80,000 words […]
Babci and Me. Courage.
My babci (grandmother), Róża, was only seventeen when she boarded the train to Antwerp—alone— near Kolno, in northeast Poland. It was December 1911, three years shy of the turmoil of World War I. Stars sparkled in the moonlight on the coarse crust of the deep frozen snow and young Róża drew her cheap coat closer […]
Attention, Whiners (That Would Be Me)
Midlife Crisis Alert. The day before yesterday, I had a weird day of self-pitying confusion. I was chalking it up to just general tiredness after a busy day, writing deep self-exploratory memoir material in a beautiful tropical setting that contrasted vastly with my frame of mind. However, this morning a link to an article about […]
Two Birthdays
This is a re-write of my earlier chapter “I Am Born”. Two Birthdays It was a few days before Memorial Day 1929, the last week in May. My maternal grandparents were out on the town, partying in the rumble seat of their best friends’ Buick Coupe. Mémère loved to dance and sing, personifying the quintessential […]
Belize Day 4 – Morning Has Broken
“Morning has broken like the first morning Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.” Cat Stevens At 5:10 AM, I peel back my comforter and step out onto my porch. Yikes, the burrito man, with his bicycle and a cooler full of breakfast, is standing there in front of me with a broad smile on […]
Belize Day 3 – Synchronicity, continued
In 1970, I was an undergraduate student at UMASS Amherst trying to come up with a suitable subject for a lithography printmaking assignment. I wasn’t terribly inspired in those days. I had a Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary that had been a graduation gift from my local hometown newspaper, where I was a high school journalist. I flipped […]
Belize Day 2
It’s been less than 12 hours since arrival in Belize and, already, I’m back in the groove. Any thoughts I had of maybe going elsewhere next winter are slowly getting squashed by the synchronicity that I always experience here. syn·chro·nic·i·ty1 /ˌsiNGkrəˈnisitē/ noun the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible […]
Perfection is Overrated
Is Perfection overrated? I think so. A writer friend just sent me a download on the importance of being “Good Enough,” as opposed to being “Perfect.” Long Story Short: If we fall victim to the whims of the Perfectionist in ourselves, we can damage the expression of our Creativity. Example: You write a stream-of-consciousness response […]
The Dream, Climbing Back to Creativity
The Dream, Climbing Back To Creativity Yesterday I arrived at my destination just as dark fell upon a tiny beach village on the U.S. side of the Canadian border at British Columbia. I had driven north on a grey day (or a gray day or a grey dey- I was already contemplating poetry and prose- […]