Today is Emmett Wilson’s 133rd birthday! I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with something clever, that does not feel contrived, to honor this auspicious day. Most of the reason for the lack of inspiration is the residual mental crispiness of burnout from all the writing this past week. […]
They’ve been chatty this weekend, Emmett and his sister, Katie Wilson Meade. Two days in the writing cave, and 37 pages. It’s a very rough draft, but it means a few important scenes are roughed in. Editing will happen later. What I wanted to accomplish this weekend was to get […]
If you stop by Congressional Cemetery here in DC in August (a great place to visit, btw), you may be in for a surprise. Goats, people! Eco-goats to be precise. They do a good job, too. Every year, Congressional Cemetery hires a herd of goats to clear the weeds, poison […]
A friend from the program sent me this meditation tonight. I was telling him how I wished I could move Emmett’s book along, and how sometimes I feel like I have to force myself to write to keep things moving. I thought you’d like to see it, too. The title […]
You know I love my students. I love teaching writing to my students. So, you have to know that this person was never one of my students… …else, she’d know how to spell her curse words correctly. This reminds me of a message I received from a student almost two […]
We have a saying in the program: Plan, but don’t plan the outcome. This is a great saying for me. It helps me manage my expectations of life; as in, I cannot control other people, places, and things. I can only control my attitude and how I respond to things. […]
Classes started yesterday at the University of Maryland, so I spent most of this past weekend tying up a few loose ends here and there, getting ready for the new semester. I look forward to seeing students on campus and in classrooms each Fall. To me, the first day of […]
Early this morning, I saw this hanging in the back yard. Impressive, isn’t it? Beautiful, actually, especially as it catches the sun. There’s symmetry and purpose in this spider’s construction. As I got close to snap the photo, it looked like she was doing a little repair work in […]
Yesterday, I came across this interesting graphic of character defects, courtesy of The Writer’s Circle: Based on my understanding of the different personalities in Emmett Wilson’s story (and of what I’ve learned about character defects in the AA world), it seems that most of the time, people have combinations of defects. […]
Last Thursday, as I was driving around in D.C., I was listening to The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU. It was a rebroadcast of an interview she conducted with E.L. Doctorow (one of my favorite writers) who had recently died. The subject was Doctorow’s book, “Homer and Langley.” Doctorow’s book […]
Tell my story. 