The writing life is a little like surfing: being tumbled under the tide but also catching some wonderful waves. I’ve just caught one of those good waves! I’m happy to say my poem “Cone of Silence” is up this month at Blue Heron Review. This online journal has a mission with a tagline from Hafiz: “An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” I’m thrilled to have my work alongside that of many…
If you have an addiction to writing like I do (and a writer by definition is an addict), perhaps like me you can’t contain it within just one literary genre. I began with poetry, getting swept up first in the poems of the haiku poets Basho, Buson, and Issa. Issa (Kobayashi Issa 1763-1828, one of the Big Four of Japanese haiku) charmed me with tiny masterpieces that evoked a stunning attention to the natural world,…
This weekend we drove to Sebastopol, over the top of the San Francisco Bay, through marshlands filled with waterbirds. I’m lucky to live near a creek where egrets hunt and nest. I take walks alongside this miniature waterway and appreciating the ducks keep an eye out for that white, upright stillness near the shore, often half hidden by tall dry grasses. When I come upon a lesser or greater egret, I stop at the pure…
Author platform: what is it, do I need it for fiction, and other brain-freezing topics. There’s so much written about this ugly word (I keep thinking of those awful shoes you can literally fall off and break your ankle), that my research has frozen my mind on the topic. So here’s my hopefully refreshing take on Platform for Novelists. You don’t need one. No, you just need to be your most authentic writer-self, and in…
Is she in ecstasy or torture? Does she look like she’s in ecstasy or torture? She must be a writer of fiction conteomplating current avenues of publication because where there was once a clear path to authorship, fame, and fortune, now … 100 articles on how to publish OR see a fabulous, must-own publishing guide by The Book Doctors and Jane Friedman’s advice on publishing. So you studied all that, and now you’re ready to…
Waiting. Publishing your writing is so full of waiting to hear from an agent or editor that medieval torture begins to seem like a diversion to inflict on yourself while enduring the greater agony. I’m at another waiting stage with my novel-in-progress, The Renaissance Club. I’ve been working on this for so long that I can’t look at it right now without guidance. I need an agent or editor to hold my hand and tell…
It’s official. History made. Glass ceiling — well, not if shattered, a network of cracks so numerous and widespread you know whose head is going through it soon. America may well have — at last — our first female president. So how has literature responded to the new world that presidential campaigns seem to indicate is approaching, a world of equality for women? Last year, complex and unlikeable but interesting female characters led the NYT…
I post this advice from author Neil Gaiman with some trepidation, having just spent a solid twelve months fixing words that were relatively easy to draft. But it’s true, if you let your inner critic sit in your lap while you type, you’re going to get your hands and words bitten all over until there are almost no words left and no hands willing to make them appear. So in the words of Anne Lamott,…
“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” – Henry David Thoreau. When I #amwriting either prose or poetry, I first write long and thin. By that I mean a lot of words to say not as much as I will wind up with, compressed. Having just finished what I hope is the final revision of a 400-page novel, I know the meaning of short…
They’re like fallen leaves, memories. They arrange themselves in nature’s beautiful random order beyond our ability to perceive, like weather, like a life until you’re looking back on it and suddenly see an organizational purpose. And are amazed into writing about it. The thing is, who else wants to see it? Why is that mysterious, suddenly perceived arrangement important to anyone but you? That’s the question a memoir essay or book must answer. Answering it…