I always read the tweets from the Don Graves Write Now Conference with longing–wishing I could be there. This year, thanks to a virtual conference, I was able to attend, and it was exactly what I needed. I took pages of notes, and my camera roll is now full of quotes and writing prompts. I…
Here’s the thing about book spine poetry: it’s impossible to create just one. Here’s the other thing about book spine poetry: it makes a big mess of your books. I now have half finished poems stacked all over my office! Oh, and one more thing about book spine poetry: cats are very curious about the…
My iPhone is a more reliable tool for capturing and retracing my mind’s wanderings than my writer’s notebook. Images are my favorite form of note-taking. Screenshots capture my learning, wonders, curiosities, and commitments. I snap places I want to travel and poems I need to share with my students. I snap other teacher’s whiteboards, other…
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing, when I didn’t have a narrator in my head turning my actions into sentences, when I wasn’t full of story ideas, when I didn’t itch to pick up a pencil and use my hand to form words on paper, when my favorite toy wasn’t my grandmother’s…
Energy vibrates through her wild eyes. This is Inky Pinky, when she was still feral, in the process of being tamed thanks to the magic of the very best cat toy, the Cat Dancer. No photo I’ve ever taken has captured the spirit of a cat quite so well. Inky still has very big round…
Right now, I’m indulging myself in a slow morning of slice reading, commenting, fishing for a slice of my own. What will strike me to write about today? Maybe pandemic hobbies. Maybe feral cat caretaking. Maybe something I haven’t discovered yet. Right now, my lap is warm and heavy and rumbly with cat. Orange Oliver…
“That was clearly the car of the day,” my husband says as we turn to watch a beautifully restored Mustang drive by. My son is so outraged he can only slap his thighs and jump up and down. Finally he finds words. “That car?! THAT car?!” More slapping and jumping. “Hell no, HELL no!” “Okay,…
I borrowed the idea of reflecting on a year of Covid lockdown in the form of lists from Mary at Write Between the Lines. Top 5 Saving Graces of 2020 My mom. For our daily walks, incessant texting, and excellent shared cat content (she’s got 5 cats including a new Detroit feral rescue!). Also, she…
We never meant for Ratty Tabby to be named Ratty Tabby, but somehow the name stuck. She showed up in August, skin and bones, eyes glassy and sunken, barely able to walk. We called her Ratty Tabby to distinguish her from the other tabbies who showed up on our porch. “The ratty-looking tabby is out…
That’s what I thought my pandemic reading year would look like. Not that anyone thought it would be a year back then. Two or three months, I thought, maybe the summer. We all had energy in March. We were listening to the Berlin Philharmonic and taking drawing classes and streaming opera and attending daily PD…
the dirigible plum 