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Category Archives: Creativity

Where I’m From with Alyson Shelton

I had the great honor of being asked to contribute to Alyson Shelton’s Where I’m From series. Here’s the video, especially if you enjoy talking about cheese curds, genealogy and inspiration.

Notes from writer camp III

  I spent my summer vacation with a bunch of really amazing people named Evee the Pokemon and Super Fantastic Bubble Plastic and Scrounge and Lady Lazuli in the Hudson Valley region of New York. We ate a lot of hippy food, drew until our hands hurt and then laughed and read aloud and laughed […]

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more

I’m having what The Boy calls “a crisis of confidence”. I don’t know that I would call it that. I think I would call it that I sometimes hate writing. And it’s not even that I hate writing. One doesn’t write for a living and then write after the work day is complete if one […]

Words of wisdom from Ira Glass on fixing broken writers

This is a true story: my friend Wendy (a different Wendy, I promise I’m not talking about myself in the third person or that this isn’t that split personality deal I talked about in this entry) once met up with me on Chicago’s Navy Pier a couple of years ago. We were drinking overpriced strawberry […]

Do MFA programs break writers?

Awhile ago, I tweeted All writer’s retreats/workshops talk about loving writing. I think I fit in better with the people who HATE writing. Where are those people? A writer friend who is having much more success in being productive than I am posited that the one thing she’s noticed about friends in MFA programs is […]

The Thrill of Having Written and the agony of Writing

My biggest problem with writing seems to be the fear that the act of writing itself will somehow not be as good as whatever supposed brilliance is floating around my noggin. That is, of course, stupid, because how would I know? And yet, half the problem with This Thing I’m Writing is just the simple […]

Everlong Everwood

Mo and Ian graciously allowed me to crash in their living room on the California leg of CA/UT trip. I thought I wasn’t planning anything, other than meeting Magnus (who is absolutely gorgeous and I can’t stop looking at his cuteness) and also, a last minute plan to race up to Napa for brunch at […]

Pottery-ing

I’m kind of in love with my pottery class. I did the wheel this week! The WHEEL! Like in Ghost! It was not as successful as that movie, sadly, in that I got really dirty but never actually got it to go. I went in again on Saturday, during open studio time. Mr. Pottery Dude […]

What really happens at writing retreats

My Vegas writing retreat was, well, Vegas. I got about halfway through the story I’m working on, which is awesome, and I would have probably finished it if, er, we hadn’t been in Vegas and only a few very long Vegas blocks from the single hottest dance club in all the land, complete with male […]

Co Irkers

The woman who lives on the other side of my cubicle has verbal diarrhea. She also feels the need to narrate her entire day to no one in particular. She will also just stand up and lob non-sequiturs over our cursed three-quarter wall and because I am facing my computer to do a quaint little […]