“Listen – are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” – Mary Oliver “Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.” –Cheryl Strayed The decision to leave a wonderful position with a delightful company where I do meaningful work alongside kindhearted coworkers is not one I take lightly. […]
This Is Why I Have To Leave Read More »
At the end of last year, I graduated from my MFA program with a degree in Creative Writing and a very small collection of short stories. I felt a great sense of pride at holding my manuscript and knowing that I created something out of nothing. I also felt anxiety. What would I do next?
In high school, I had a vision. I was sitting next to my dad who was driving, in silence, through Danvers, MA, where I grew up, past the white-washed colonial building Danvers Savings Bank dating back to the 1700’s, a revolutionary war cemetery, the Rebecca Nurse house, the witch from the Salem witch trials. All
On Narcissism and Shame Read More »
1. On your birds: You write about birds because they’re out the window. That’s fine. You have to spend a lot of time staring out the window to be a writer, and what moves when you’re staring out the window? In most of the US, birds. I’d just be careful about what your birds do
I’m not sure when it happened, when my words fell away from ordinary, peeling away sneakers to don ruby slippers, starting requesting lemon zest and garnish. I don’t know, exactly, when my words were made to hang back in the green room waiting for a green light to shine.My words don’t think twice about being
We were out at our house in Mount Carroll, Illinois for a quick turnaround weekend away. Mount Carroll is a small town just ten miles away from the Mississippi River, a quiet place where we try to step out of our Chicago city lives. Where we try to slow down. So there I was in my writing
The Long and The Short of It ~ One Writer’s Training Read More »
I have been working on this essay for three days now. I have alternately been profound and poetic like Toni Morrison, curmudgeonly and erudite like Jonathan Franzen, and curmudgeonly and witty like David Sedaris. Oh, the beauty of my paragraphs! They make me dance! The points made are salient and insightful, the narrative flowing, my
LeVans Work As a Team Read More »
It’s been two months since I sent my (possible) agent the book. My manuscript. My novel. (Whatever.) A book I’ve been obsessed with for several years. Lost in the pages. Hurtling myself across the screen, and then across Scandinavia, trying to remember who I was when I was twenty-two, working in the far north on
The Tyranny of Time Read More »
In the Afterword of my forthcoming book, Jared Woodland writes: “This book is a development of obsessive abandon, one outcome of a transfixion from which the author might never recover.” Indeed the obsession that the project circled around is yet transposed over my gaze, a fixation that has changed the way I engage with the
There is No Redemption: On Writing and Obsession Read More »
I’ve never been a wake-up-at-five-in-the-morning-and-write-every-day kind of gal. I have nothing but admiration for people with that seat-of-the-pants-to-the-chair discipline, but that’s never been me. Instead I tend to wait — to cogitate and agitate — until I absolutely must put something on paper, until, whether because of an imposed deadline or internal pressure, it’s simply
Writing Well Will Cost You Read More »
