Notes From the Toolbox
The Birth of a Painting
The Gift This painting hangs in the living room of my house. It didn’t always. Once upon a time there was a large painting of cattails going to seed upon this wall. It was one of the ugliest paintings I’ve ever seen, and I had no desire to see it on a daily basis. But...
A+ DAY DREAMERS
On Saturday, I transcribed a bunch of Notes for this Toolbox. Took them out of my notebook and placed them in a computer document, so on Sunday, I could print them out and reshape them into something readable to share. I was very excited because this task is one of my...
I’m Not Nora Ephron— Part 1
Writers aren’t supposed to talk in detail about their Work-In-Progress. It might jinx the flow, or bring the project to a halt. But I’ve decided to risk pissing off the Snow Queen because, well, the process is driving me a little crazy, and what I’m learning might be...
(Parentheses Stole My Heart)
Confession— I never thought about punctuation until I read The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The way he uses a semi-colon is damn sexy. I wanted that for my writing. Unaware of semi-colon rules, I tossed them into paragraphs willy-nilly until a writing teacher set me...
Notebooks
I’ve become obsessed with notebooks. I have nothing against loose-leaf paper. Loose-leaf gives me freedom to abandon the stories that aren’t showing me any love. As Margaret Atwood says… The wastebasket is your friend. But the ease of tossing loose paper gives me an...
My Bah-humbug Book List
It's that time of year again. I'm not referring to the Holidays, or setting aside time to take stock of what I did or didn't accomplish over the last eleven months in order to prepare for those dreaded New Year's Resolutions. I refuse to participate in winter...
Writing Tangents
In my early morning writing sessions words flow with urgent ease. Today was no different. Then Bam! I dropped my pen. I stopped writing because I caught myself veering into a tangent. Tangents happen. I’ve grown to love them. They often help me drop deeper into my...
A Writer’s Garden
Yaya, my Greek grandmother, was a gardener. The best gardener I’ve ever seen. She loved fresh cut flowers in her house. Her backyard was so overrun with flowering plants— even in the fall something was in bloom— only a tiny patch of grass was visible in the center,...
Anything Can Happen
Writing is momentum. When I allow my hand to run across the page— driven solely by what Natalie Goldberg calls Wild Mind— anything can happen. It’s why I show up. Why I’ve always shown up. The first to arrive and the last to leave because I couldn’t risk missing out....
Unicorns, Pink Elephants & Storytelling
My college spending money was earned by working as a counselor for a Girl Scout camp in Michigan. Summers at camp were the best way to burn off the drudge of the academic year: ghost stories around the campfire, cheeks exhausted from laughing at the shenanigans of...