When I was younger, I thought the toe-curling reaction I had to a few hours of writing time stretching out before me made me abnormal. Either I had confused what I thought was a feverish passion for writing with some other fever – a delusional one, perhaps – or I didn’t have the … [Read more...]

I had many pet peeves when I was a writing teacher, and almost none of them came directly from the students themselves. They came, instead, from the students’ warped sense of what writing should look like, both in practice and in execution, and it still gets my knickers in a … [Read more...]

It’s no secret that writers have a hard time being nice to themselves. I don’t know why this is. Maybe the only people driven to regularly put lots of words down on paper are already a wee bit touched to begin with. And maybe the resulting madness of trying to shape words into … [Read more...]

About eight years ago, shortly after the birth of my third child, I realized I needed to renegotiate my relationship to myself. I wasn’t just tired and burned out, I was on a slippery slope to the kind of martyrdom that doesn’t work in the best of cases, and can bring a family … [Read more...]

Yesterday, my kids and I needed a project. We’d spent the weekend on the beach and were all exhausted and sunburned and cranky. As a growing family of five, we have LOTS of to do lists, so we decided to tackle the curious bookshelf that lives between our dining and living spaces, … [Read more...]

I recently came across the work of Gavin Jones, a Stanford scholar who is researching the role that failure has played in the creation of great literature (he recently published a book entitled Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History). He argues that the professional … [Read more...]

This one is for you diehard perfectionists out there. You know who you are. You haven’t finished that novel because you “just haven’t gotten around to it,” though it’s been sitting on your desk/computer/chest for the past ten years. You can’t write because all your youthful … [Read more...]

If anything, it’s undefinable. And I hope it remains so. Yet I’m always so surprised to come into contact with people who see it, somehow, as small. A thing for Disney movies and incurable romantics and – I don’t know – puppies? A thing those of us too naïve or soft to know any … [Read more...]

I’m writing this from my favorite spot on earth – Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It’s a little spit of land off the north coast of the state, and it’s all light and ocean and old houses and visits from nearly forgotten but essential ghosts of myself. We spent almost every summer up … [Read more...]