Category: A Writer’s Life
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Chasing our Quaker ancestors from a log cabin in the woods
It was beginning to seem like a game of tag… to find out as much as possible about my three times great aunt, Mary Jane Edwards who went South with her sister Lizzie– my three times great grandmother– to teach freedmen right after the Civil War. And it was filled with stops and starts, dashes, and…
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A celebration of the muumuu
The closest I could come to the muumuu of my aging hippie friend was a Chambray dress hidden on the clearance rack at Walmart. Prefaded, loose and long. As I wriggled my arms inside its buttery fabric and let it fall over my head, it granted me instant permission to be free. Free from importance.…
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The Coelacanth Still Scares Me
Suddenly, now that I have time to think, things aren’t the same anymore. Suddenly, things that were factual, aren’t. Or things that were fringe are mainstream. Case in point: Pangea. “No, of course the continents were never all hooked together,” my fifth grade teacher snorted. Even though we looked at a map and could see the…
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Making your writing real
What’s your strategy? Call me old school. I have gray hair. I can accept that tag without too much fuss. I never fell into the rabbit hole of video games or TikToking that sucks and slurps the gray matter right out of some folks’ heads and dissolves hours from their lives. So visual learning or…
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We were on a quest
The single-lane gravel drive through the line of trees gave a shady respite to the heat of the June day. We snaked the car up the hill. According to the ochre-colored map, we had turned off old US 40 in the right place, but there wasn’t a tombstone in sight. In fact, as our tires…
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Things Just Fell Into Place
It was nothing remarkable that I did. Nothing that I especially deserved. It just happened. That’s how my 3xs great aunt’s diary has become a novel.
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How does your personality impact your writing?
Maybe more than you think! It happened again. And what a powerful lesson our personalities hold! Every year when introducing my students to the elements of rhetoric, I use the Myers-Briggs Personality Test to make a much larger point, one I hope stays with them for the rest of their lives. About ten years ago…
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Who doesn't like a survey?
Helping student writers create their own primary research Are you smart enough to spell these words? Which Disney princess are you? Are you an official bookworm? Which flower matches your personality? Quizzes, questionnaires, and surveys are all the rage for the over-thirty crowd on Facebook. Taking surveys can be loads of fun. Who doesn’t want…
