A Blog About Creativity
The sled driver is a stocky, high-octane woman in her twenties, already missing a few teeth. She’s untangling the webbed harnesses and judiciously selecting ten dogs to pull a sled for the tourists on a circuit around Beaver Pond. All one hundred … [Continue reading]
Gertrude refuses to travel. I don’t blame her. The anxiety over missed connections. The expense. Squeezed into seats with total strangers. She’s a large woman, not terribly interested in sharing her space. And a germaphobe, with her packets of … [Continue reading]
Gertrude’s rooting around in her massive faux-leather purse. Sitting in the front passenger seat, she hands me a broken windshield wiper, one of those back wipers that gets wrenched off in a drive-through carwash. It could have been from my car, but … [Continue reading]
Driving at top speed down a five-lane expressway, I glance in the rearview mirror. A semi is on my tail, the driver perched in his two-story cab. And there’s no room to pull over. Gertrude is cowering just out of view. I feel her clutching at my seat … [Continue reading]
Show, don’t tell. Only use active verbs. And write what you know. Years ago, I attended a writers’ workshop in Port Townsend, Washington. Ursula Hegi (Stones in the River) described fact-checking the scene of a restaurant kitchen fire for a new … [Continue reading]
A number of years ago I practiced the piano every day, half an hour before my kids had to get up for school. (And why did they tolerate my interrupting those last precious moments of sleep?) At first, I practiced old pop tunes and then I graduated … [Continue reading]
On a recent trip to Bhutan, I fell in love with the stark, snow-capped Himalayas, the orange and blue and green and yellows of the painted lintels on the houses, terraced hillsides littered with shaken rice sheaves, first-growth mossy forests, and … [Continue reading]
I remember the first time I heard the word hubris. It sounded like a personal quality you didn’t want, but maybe sheepishly admitted to. And then soon afterward, I heard the word again. I looked it up in the dictionary multiple times, unable to hold … [Continue reading]
