January 25, 2012 – 8:54 am
I’ve spent the last three weeks in one place doing one thing. And, although I will leave my mother’s house two days from now with a stack of manuscript pages, I will also leave with a great deal more knowledge about how I get in my own way. There are people, many of them dear friends of mine, who can’t wait to sit down alone and shape their thoughts and feelings into sentences and paragraphs. I so wish I were one of them. There are some who have learned to trust their creative process, others who entertain a muse, some…
November 26, 2011 – 2:45 pm
“If your daily life seems of no account, don’t blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its treasures. For the creative artist there is no impoverishment and no worthless place.” — Rilke I’ve been thinking about these words since I first read them a couple of weeks ago. What does it mean to be a poet of daily life? I often wish I were more creative, wish I possessed whatever spark of genius and imagination it takes to write fiction, to paint the landscape outside my window, to transform a garden bed into a…
October 31, 2011 – 12:41 pm
It’s a pretty remarkable Halloween – two feet of snow are piled up outside the window, and the pumpkins are buried under white stuff. I’m sure that, all over the Northeast, moms and kids are rethinking Halloween costumes, trying to figure out how to bundle princesses into parkas, whether a Zombie in a snowsuit still has a fear factor, how to convince a six-year-old that even ghosts wear boots. Such parenting challenges are behind me, though I well remember the joy of a balmy Halloween night and, on a frosty one, the delicate negotiations required to keep everyone both reasonably…
October 2, 2011 – 3:56 pm
I’ve already received exactly what I asked for for my birthday tomorrow. I gave my sons Henry and Jack plenty of advance warning and then I was quite clear about my wishes: Handwritten letters, please. Not e-mails. Not hastily signed store-bought cards. Not presents. Just letters, from each of them to me. Somewhat to my surprise, they both came through as requested — early, in fact. There are two sealed, handwritten envelopes sitting on the kitchen table at our house, and I can’t wait to open them. But there are many other gifts, invisible ones, that I find myself thinking…
September 20, 2011 – 8:58 am
Driving out to Hopkinton in the dark on Sunday morning, it was hard to believe that we could possibly walk all that way back to Boston in one day. Hard to imagine all our fifty-plus-year-old bodies carrying us the distance we’d promised to go. Impossible to know how any of us would feel at the end of 26 miles. But it was easy to remember why were there in the first place, joining the throng of dedicated walkers: because we loved our friend Diane Brewster, and we knew without question that, had her cancer taken a different course, she would…
