At a family party on a sheer, cloudless day, I’m crawling around my mom’s patio combing my way through the mossy pavers. What I’m looking for is an earring, a small opal stud. It used to be mine but, just an hour earlier, my mom handed the pair down to my daughter who left the earrings loose on the table and subsequently dropped one. We moved the heavy, wrought iron chairs out of the way and I’m on my knees tracing stones and moss, hopeful I can find the earring. I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s …
writing
You Do Not Have to Be Good: A Permission Slip
When I think about myself a year ago, I think about the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kneesFor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodyLove what it loves. I wish I had committed this poem to memory, like the poems I memorized in graduate school that still swim in my head. My poetry teacher made us memorize two poems per semester and I only remember fragments. …
On Hustle Culture: A Writer’s Confession
The other day on a FaceTime call with a writer friend, we were talking about social media. A few months ago, she emailed to check in on me and we began to kindle a writerly friendship that’s evolved into a once-a-week video chat. We talk about our lives, our goals, and what we being a writer means to us both. When the subject of social media comes up—which it usually does at some point during our calls—I have a lot to say. I haven’t been on Instagram in eleven months and the previous year had …
Waiting and Listening While Things Grow
Last year, after unexpectedly and abruptly ending a major project, a friend wrote to me to say she was sorry things were ending but she wanted to encourage me. Something new would be birthed through this. Something, she said, would shake loose. I wanted to believe that was true. When a door closes, a window opens, or something like that. The things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. But I could feel it. Something inside me was stirring. An idea, an inkling. What it was, I …
Only What Matters: May Recap
Early in May, I finished typing up all the handwritten pages for my book. I hadn’t been keeping track and I knew I was starting to repeat some of the stories I’d written. Writing in a non-linear way has been working for me, but suddenly it seemed like the words were getting unruly. When I typed the last handwritten page and compiled the entire document, it totaled 33,800 words in 89 pages. That’s a lot of words and a lot of pages. I felt like I was losing control of them. I sent them to …