Posts Tagged ‘the art of writing’
The Winter of My Brain
Out of hibernation we emerge! The clocks have sprung forward, the spring equinox has passed, the groundhog failed to see his shadow last month and so predicted an early new season. Boy, am I glad to hear it, as here at our home on the top of a small mountain, we had a direct lightning…
Read MoreKilling A Novel Stone Dead
I am often asked what the book on which I am currently working is about. I usually simply say that it is a novel this time–instead of a memoir–but people are persistent. They are determined to know what the book is about. Is it a mystery, a thriller, a romance? I am sure it isn’t…
Read MoreLet Your Own Sun Shine
Look back over 2015 and what do you see? A string of experiences and dilemmas to which you responded, reacted, or resolved. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. The “worse” is what helps us formulate our “New Year’s Resolutions.” I do it just about every year: when I was sixteen, I resolved…
Read MoreDodging Curveballs
Sometimes life sends us curveballs. Just when we are least expecting it, a new situation arises, be it good or bad, and we are left scrambling. Not so long ago, I was talking with a friend whose older sister had died suddenly quite some time ago, and who was having difficulty coming to terms with…
Read MoreONE WORD AT A TIME
Last week, as some of you will remember from the invitation I sent out, I was lucky enough to be “in conversation with” author Erica Jong, just as the last newsletter was going out. It was an evening event with a best-selling novelist who also just happens to be one of the friends I most…
Read MoreAT MY MOTHER’S KNEE
I was born into a home filled with shelves stuffed full of books. When I was a child, my mother, the poet Anne Sexton, frequently read aloud to me, and the first book I would remember well was a dog-eared blue volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, full of all its macabre horrors. As I reached…
Read MoreFROM RATTING TO WRITING
February has arrived, with its daffodils pushing up from the earth here in Northern California, and its heavy drifts of snow where some of my friends live in New England. Regardless of location, all of us remind ourselves that the new season is just around the corner, whether we do so with the despair of…
Read MoreMEET MAC! “BESPOTTED’S” COVER DOG!
As I promised you in my last newsletter, today you will meet one of my Dalmatians. I have chosen to tell you an anecdote about Mac, our youngest, as he is the “cover dog” for Bespotted. You can watch Mac as he grows up in the photos below this blog. Mac was born into a litter of…
Read More