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If you find yourself with a pen in your hand, but you don’t know what to write. If you mean to put down a few lines, but you’re speechless, and you don’t know what to say. If you find yourself staying in your pajamas for hours, promising yourself that you’ll get up,...

The house didn’t get cleaned because I was going after the anxiety, playing a lot of solitaire, re-writing the list, looking ahead at the calendar, considering my next move, wondering if I’ll need hiking boots and a rain coat for New Mexico, wondering what it will be...

“They don’t have to be good,” said my friend, Rosemerry, “but they do need to be true.” This is the bar my friend, the poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer set for herself when she set out to write and publish a poem a day in 2011, which was 12 years, and roughly 4000...

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 the...

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...