When I was starting out as a writing teacher over 20 years ago, I remember talking with my friend and mentor Mark Dahlby who ran writers.com, where I taught writing to adults for many years. I must have been going over the classes I was teaching, and at one point Mark...

As I write this, I’m sitting on a hotel bed in San Miguel de Allende on the eve of a writing / photography workshop that my dear friend Andrea Scher and I are hosting this week. This might be our 10th workshop in San Miguel in the last five years. Some of the ladies...

One of the first things I noticed when I walked into my mother’s house last  Sunday night was that she had taped the same printed message on little pieces of paper all over the house – on her bathroom mirror, on the wall across from her bed, the refrigerator, by...

Is it enough to take these notes? To be a collector of moments? To be someone who notices the smallest things and who writes them down? Can the bits and pieces of this life; the way he reached for my hand, the text from the sick child, the banjo sitting in the corner...

So I won’t forget the look on my 85-year-old mother’s face when she came upstairs to make contact with me after our little tiff during the holidays. I write to slow that moment down so that I can remember the timid sound of her knock on my door, and the way she...

Some of the richest experiences I’ve had in my life have been when I’m alone, far from home, often in another country. There’s something about being one single human being standing on my own two feet, far from the comforts of home and the things I think I need to make...

It started as a simple question, “Do you like salmon?” My friend Steve texted before my trip up to Ashland, Oregon. I’d be staying with Steve and his wife Kate, who were hosting a half-day Wild Writing workshop for their friends, and in honor of Steve’s 70th birthday....

Instead of trying to make sense of everything, I want to say… That there’s a fine yellow filament falling from the trees in my yard. I’ve been on this property for 27 years and it only started happening a few years ago. The trees are telling us something. And when...

Today’s sermon is a friend writing from her Parisian vacation that she’s come down with Covid. It’s the fourth date I didn’t have with the former rock star on account of all his coughing. It’s my sneeze that might be something, but doesn’t go anywhere, and packing a...

Start with the mismatched boots you discovered you were wearing last week as you boarded your flight to Mexico. You’d be teaching for five days, and here you were in the Oakland Airport looking down at one brown boot, and one black boot – both put on hastily...