helpful resources for writers and my words: essays, poems, book reviews and now and then – a prayer.
Ahead of me on the journey by a decade, friend, mentor and often guide Marchiene Rienstra told me the other day about an insight that came to her on one of her morning walks in Sedona. May this poem honor her insight, a way of passing it forward. Life after Forty...
In this political season so fraught with angry people – it’s worth asking “Do You Do Well to Be Angry?” A question God once asked the Hebrew prophet Jonah, and the title of a message I gave a number of years ago. Sadly – what makes the biblical stories still relevant is that too...
Margaret Atwood once said – “I write prose to know what I’m thinking. And poetry to know what I’m feeling.” For me too – poetry was the right vessel to convey the emotions that swept over me after my brother called with words I had been longing for – for four long years. Closure on a tragedy – time for healing to begin.
Stanley Kunitz’s spirit continues with us – in words like these from his 1994 commencement address at St. Mary’s College, Maryland. Draw them in – deeply… “If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we...
This from an email Elizabeth Berg sent writer Donald Murray. I came across it while reading My Twice-Lived Life. I discovered Donald Murray late in my writing life. What a gift he was and is to the to all of us who love pen and page and word. Another one of those quotes I...
“The poet Linda Gregg asks her students to take a close look at just six things each day. What seems like a simple discipline turns out to be quite difficult because, by habit, most of us go through our lives without paying much attention to anything. Surely it’s happened to you: at the end...