Last night, Democrat Doug Jones defeated accused serial pedophile Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election. It's beginning to look a lot like Resistance, eeeeeeverywhere you go... (^^^I stole that

Today I read Rebecca Solnit's essay "On women's work and the myth of the art monster" at Lit Hub, in which she defends art-making females against charges of selfishness. Today, in a private group

I wrote this post two years ago yesterday on my blog another writing mom (when my son was barely 3, and when I was mommy blogging instead of being bowled over by memoir!). The boy and the presents are

Remember journals? Remember filling notebooks with drafts of poems and stories? Remember typing them all up when you were sure they were “finished”? Or do you still keep those journal and notebooks? For

I had what I would call a very good weekend. Sometimes, when the weeks are so busy I spend more than one lunch break sobbing into my steering wheel or rage-vaping in the work bathroom (where there's a

I don’t know about you, but as the end-of-year holidays approach, the largest and loudest feeling I feel is gratitude. The festive season and the longer nights make me cozy up to awareness of what I have,

If you’re a tech-loving writer who composes on screen but hasn’t explored the wide world of writing apps, you might be missing out on some ways to majorly boost your productivity, motivation, and inspiration.

I might be prone to exaggeration, but only about the number 7,452, not about the fact that writing has saved me on numerous occasions. I was a lonely kid who got yelled at a lot, and who spent most of

I'm a writer, and writers sometimes do shitty things, so the issue of whether or not we can separate the art from the artist is one that's been on my radar for some time. We, as a society, examine this

On Friday, I took a vacation day and checked into a hotel to write. Go to a coffee shop, suggested more than one friend when I spent the better part of last month complaining about how being at home distracts

Why journal? To chart your progress, jot down ideas on the fly, list goals and challenges, record feelings, make lists, and so much more. Check out these five types of journals to keep: Personal Maybe

In my few and precious windows of down time, when I’m not reading memoir, I’m watching HGTV. Tiny House Hunters. Fixer Upper. Property Brothers. Love It or List It. I love me some Love It or List It. I’m

I've been struggling lately with my five-year-old son's impulsivity. When I was pregnant with Jax, his due date was early February. Ooo, an Aquarius, I thought. Except, inexplicably, he was born on Oct.

Do you get it yet? Abusers and rapists are everywhere. They are the Heathcliff Huxtable family types who seem to be the picture of loving morality. They are your teen heartthrob crush. They are small-town

My writing space is a deeply personal realm. I enter it to make art; and while I can technically write anywhere, my home base for writing is a sanctuary for my creativity. I firmly believe that the

Some of the most difficult aspects of writing make themselves known after the first draft is on the page or screen: revising, cutting beloved passages that don’t advance a narrative or metaphor, choosing

I have the pleasure of working with five amazing women through the Center for Creative Writing, which I now direct, and one of them is prose writer and journalist Jennifer Steil. I’ve had her memoir The

I run the Center for Creative Writing, which offers five-week sessions of eight different online writing courses to help beginning and blocked writers find the wonder of the written word, practice showing

So #MeToo has been quite successful in raising awareness of rape culture. Our feeds have been saturated with stories by women about their sexual harassment and assaults, along with headline after headline

Writing is one set of choices after another—about imagery, sound, what to include, what to leave out, who to name, who to kill off, where to give background info, when to let readers fill in the blanks