November 29, 2012 – 9:08 pm
I didn’t think it would hurt, to be rejected by a magazine. But, at age 54, I guess I should have learned that it takes a while to recover from unrequited love. Apparently, according to the editors at O, I should also have my life figured out by now. I should know exactly who I am and what my work is here on this earth. Those thorny questions about meaning and destiny? “By the time you’re 40 or 42,” said Oprah in last Sunday’s New York Times, “you should have kind of figured that out already.” Oprah is not happy…
September 10, 2012 – 12:00 pm
For the last eighteen years, September in our family has meant a shift: from open-ended summer hours to school schedules. If you’re a parent, you know all about the mixed feelings that accompany the turning of the season. In this month of shorter days, cooler nights, fresh starts, and new notebooks, the urge to shake things up a little coincides quite neatly with the departure of children, the return to classes, a kind of general buckling down and getting back to business. I’m always a little sad to see my own boys go, already regretting the swims we didn’t get…
February 14, 2012 – 12:23 pm
The theme of my life this winter can be summed up in a word: practice. Two-thirds of the way through a memoir, with another four chapters to go and a deadline less than two months away, I have made a commitment to writing practice. But I am a slow writer, never certain of the way forward, and so I have no choice but to practice patience. Waiting for words to come, trusting that if I stay here long enough, the next sentence will find its way home to me, requires a certain kind of faith. Faith in mystery and faith…
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…
We were in the throes of change: selling a house, moving in with my parents, buying a house, fixing up a house, moving into that house, giving up on fixing up the house, deciding to tear the whole thing down instead, moving back in with my parents, building a house. In the midst of these prolonged real estate dramas, we suffered the strain of pulling up roots in a place that we loved and trying to sink roots down into another that we barely knew. I lost my job. My husband started a business. Meanwhile, we were also trying to…
