With the rhythms and events that normally shape our days cancelled or viewed through a window, I’m often dazed and my perception of time is off. I spent the first month of the pandemic writing poetry full of sand and hourglass imagery and losing time in my day. And...
One morning as I was staying with my in-laws’ in Cairo, I woke up to the sound of what I thought were screams. I turned to my partner and found him also awake and was surprised to find his expression sad and not startled or fearful. “Someone has died,” he explained. I...
As you gear up to start a new writing routine and set new goals (or recommit to a routine and goals) for your writing this year, I want to share my manifesto for staying the course with your writing this year. Starting new writing projects can be thrilling and...
The biggest epiphany I had about my writing in the last year is that there is nothing special about my story. This sounds like a terrible epiphany, I realize! But it was so liberating. Let me explain.The message that my story isn’t special landed the hardest the day I...
Does Writing Need to be Hard? “To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.” Arne Garborg As writers, I think we all have times when our call to be a writer, that song in our hearts, gets drummed out. We...
For several years after my first book came out, I didn’t write and I’d sometimes wonder in those years, Am I still a writer?My answer then was a firm no, because I believed the maxim, “Writers write.”The logic of that phrase is that, if I’m doing the act of writing...
