Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
These days, when civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s…
It’s been over twenty years since Natalie Goldberg urged us to “free the writer within” in what seemed, at the time, her groundbreaking (well, in some circles) book, Writing Down the Bones, first published in 1986. Yep, Reagan was still President…
A while back, I took an online class that was all about getting past writer’s block. I’m not even sure that I had a case of writer’s block at the time; I’d been writing away fairly regularly, with the usual peripatetic ups and down but somehow something felt—and thus kept getting—stuck. Looking back now, I think what I mostly needed at that moment was…
Mary Oliver is a beloved contemporary poet. Her work is read at weddings and funerals and by Garrison Keillor on his radio show, “The Writer’s Alamanac.” Even my yoga teacher in Corvallis, Oregon, often began our class with inspirational lines from Oliver’s work…
Every one of us has one of those books—assigned in a class, passed along from a friend, found in the bottom of the box you bought for a buck at the annual Friends of the Library book sale in Ithaca, New York…
Trigger is not one of my favorite nouns mostly thanks to its too frequent use under sad and horrific circumstances in this gun-toting, trigger-happy country of ours. But one of my favorite books about writing is a little gem by Richard Hugo called The Triggering Town…
I have been reading Annie Dillard’s book, The Writing Life, again this week. It was published way back in the dark ages of 1989. That was right around when I re-opened the writing Pandora’s box in my own life and put pen back to paper, fingers to QWERTY keyboard again. Not long after, I headed to graduate school part-time, feeling for the first time in forever that I’d been reunited with my creative tribe. Sing hosannas—wait, not so fast….
Being a person too often inclined to the melancholy and darker side of life, I was struck by this comment by Barbara LaMorticella on Dojo Poetry Editor Kirsten Rian’s recent blog post about happiness: “In flamenco music, in Spanish poetry, there is a hard to define quality called ‘duende,’ which is a grief so deep it…
Present economic conditions have been serving up a familiar and unsettling feeling of déjà vu of late. Some days, it feels as if we are back in the late 1930s only with 24/7 media, social networking, iPhones, and twittering thrown in just to make us wonder if it’s really “Back to the Future” instead…
Characterization is the lifeblood of fiction for many readers—and writers, too. Oh, I’m seduced by the twists and turns of plot as much as the next person. But time and again, what I’m most drawn to when reading is the effect that events have on the story’s characters…
