Tag: writing

activism, Learning, race, Take Action

Reading Beyond

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tinho book mural

This time last year, I decided to change how I read. Or, more accurately, to change what I read. It was one small way to keep breathing expansiveness and hope at a time when despair threatened to suffocate both.

As is true for any bibliophile, reading fills up swaths of the time I’m not working or sleeping. Certainly other activities populate the days — eating, dancing, hanging with the kiddo, chilling with the girlfriends. Church and family. In fact, I trip and tumble over the heaps of stuff comprising our days. It’s a wonder stories make it in here at all.

Nevertheless, as is also true for any bibliophile, I find a way. The rare hushed hours, those still stretches, most deliciously belong to books. Bedtime, summertime, solitary dinners. And not always solitary. Sometimes my boy and I read side-by-side at the table weaving tendrils of languid conversation into the quiet. Even at eleven years old, Bug still wants me reading aloud every night at bedtime. We travel through the fantasy worlds we’ve entered together. Having only just acquired a TV after nearly five years without, the universes of film and television hold little appeal. Our secret indulgences almost always involve the page. Continue reading “Reading Beyond” →

Brain, community, Writing

All The Better to See You With

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lip and eye

It starts here.

9pm, heading home from pub trivia at a busy spot near my office. Down on the metro platform, the orange line train pulls in. Only six stops to my station. I’ll be walking the dog by 9:30.

The doors slide open onto a car bubbling with chatter. Summer in DC, the weekend lasts all week. Between nuzzling couples and clusters of young people, a few wilted office drones slouch and sleep. I take one of the few unoccupied seats. Bar hoppers stream out around me.

 

Manspreading.

He takes up a row. Briefcase on its side next to the window, legs splayed, foot halfway into the aisle. As I settle into a corner perpendicular across the car, he catches my eye. I ignore him, pull out my journal and start writing.

The sensation a prickle, a tiny persistent sting against scalp and skin.

He’s still looking.

Continue reading “All The Better to See You With” →

Art, Determination, Purpose, Writing

Core’s Correction

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ascent-of-the-spirit

We frame resilience. . . as the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.

– Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

Having hit all the deadlines for Phase 1, I steered eagerly into Phase 2.  Blocks of writing time for the season ahead peppered my calendar.  Accountability buddies jumped on board.  To celebrate the milestone as well as the momentum, My Mister dipped into the Treat Jar and agreed to host a game night.

Then on the second-to-last day of the first month, my project ran aground.

Continue reading “Core’s Correction” →

Choices, Determination, Purpose, Writing

Treat Jar

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Comedy

The professor wears plaid clogs.  She strides into the conference room, bold black and gray swimming around feet sheathed in silver-threaded socks.  I tell her I like her style.  She tells me that every time she hits a professional milestone, she buys herself shoes.  She can stand in her closet and scan the trajectory of her career: her first publication shoes, her first edited volume shoes.  The plaid clogs?  Tenure-track shoes.

“What’s next?” I ask.

“Full professor, going up next year.”

“Have you scoped out the shoes?”

She shakes her head.  “Oh no, that would jinx it.”  Then she grins.  “Which is a total lie.  There are these boots,” she sort of moans.  “Boots and a whole new outfit to go with them.”

This concept mystifies me.  One friend picks out a fancy purse for every promotion or raise.  Coach, Kate Spade, Louis Vuitton.  Another takes herself on a cruise.  I clap along but something rankles.  We’re dogs now?  We get cookies for every well-timed wiggle?

Continue reading “Treat Jar” →

Art, Writing

Listen Now

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starry-night

Itzhak Perlman was riding shotgun when the October moon slid out onto the horizon. The soloist’s strokes teased from the slimmest strings the opening notes of Beethoven’s violin concerto.  Other players followed and a rumble rose from deep in the bouts of cello and bass, swelling to a roar and thundering through my ribs, pressing out the tears.  The stoplight was seconds from green so I pressed back.  It took some effort.  It took my breath.

The moon lay herself down in a hammock of treetops and followed us with her sleepy gaze.

Across town, a young writer of mysteries saw her too.  What echoed across the dusk to his ears was Don McLean’s “Vincent,” at least the opening verse.  His song reached in through the passenger side window and wound around the Berlin Philharmonic.  I pulled into a jammed parking lot.  They grabbed their instruments by the neck and careened off together, streaking light across the purple sky.

Continue reading “Listen Now” →

Determination, Purpose, Writing

Blueprint Phase 1, Step 2

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cpb-plan

On Tuesday night, I brought 3 days and 10 pages of notes to heel in this whacked out mind  map.  Even with my scattered brain forever chasing down The Meaning Of It All, I was able to rip the material and pin details to their categories.  One night later, I had expanded this into a clean, 3-page document charting each week-long task between now and May 1, 2017.  It’s typed.  With headings.  That makes it real, right?

Continue reading “Blueprint Phase 1, Step 2” →

Creativity, Determination, Purpose, Writing

Writing Project Blueprint, Phase 1

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romanesque-architecture

Assignment #1: Prepare an action plan for reaching a medium-term writing goal. You have seven days to complete and submit plan.

Assignment details:

Write up an overarching SMART goal and then generate a series of intermediate objectives, each with its own subset of deliverables.  The objectives and deliverables will use measurable action words, such as those in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and will themselves include all the elements of SMART goals (most importantly, specificity and timeline).

As the details of the interim requirements resolve into view, they may reveal that the Big Papi goal is itself problematic.  The goal might be too ambitious or your schedule unrealistic. Revise as necessary. The plan will be more effective if it emerges from an adaptive exchange between desired outcome and deliberative process.

Here is an example of my possible Big Papi writing goal:  By May 1, 2017, prepare for submission a working draft of book proposal (with complete outline), introduction, and chapter 1.

Continue reading “Writing Project Blueprint, Phase 1” →

Art, Writing

Write Any Way

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the-girl-in-the-wood

He asks me, “What are you writing?”

Should-be-simple question.  Nevertheless.  WritING and What suggest a singular focus towards an identified goal, and if only.

Of the half dozen projects begun in the past dozen years, I am WritING exactly zero Whats.  To complete that sentence: half dozen projects begun and abandoned because (– excuses dolled up as reasons –) keep damming the river.

The biggest boulders of debris may look like procrastination, may feel like avoidance, may clang like doubt

May choke like syrup even as it caulks the leaks where the hunger seeps through

Continue reading “Write Any Way” →

Change, Writing

Carry On

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taylor-glass-head

Poor as sin, a bottle of wet, two friends dead. A man outside her window. Wallet on the car floor, wheels spitting asphalt, WaWa bathroom, brown tile walls. Lady pushes her girl into the stall, “You go even if you don’t have to.”

First book with chapters: Sweet Valley High. Which one, all the same. Skin dry, skin slick, so pretty before but realized it too late, that’s always the story. She borrows makeup from a friend, color off. Friend is a generous term. They had been small enough to fit on the same block.  Once.  Adults now, those girls, dulled but also steady.  Selective memory to fill gaps.

New shoes she didn’t buy. Two quarters and a dime, a pack of gum gone soft, the name of the baby they took or she gave, who remembers. The recipe for making him stay, the back of a stained receipt, a language she learned to whisper but never to speak. Paycheck stub, proof of value, plastic troll with hair, once blue.

Continue reading “Carry On” →