UPDATE: Look at this wonderful piece by Constance Hale Scribe on the crafting of sentences. It’s chock full of fine sentence examples, some of which I could add to my list! -ed. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/sentences-crisp-sassy-stirring/ Sometimes, I am astonished at how much vocabulary I lack. I want to describe things and try to think of words other …
My grandfather passed away today, at the age of 88. Here is something I wrote last month: Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. My paternal grandmother lived in Florida when she died, in 2005. She’d been living …
I lay awake in bed this morning, woken up by a toddler with a very wet diaper. I clean her up and she climbs into bed with us, next to her father and sister. She finds a comfortable position and goes back to sleep. I, on the other hand, am not so lucky. It is …
I don’t know how to write about being deaf. I don’t know how to write about it any more than I know how to write about being a woman or being 33. Being deaf is a physical condition that somehow also exists as a condition of personality. Is personality the right word? I don’t know …
Today’s writing exercise is inspired by the chapter titled “Writing as Practice” in Writing Down the Bones. To do this exercise yourself, set a time limit– 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever. And just write. Just write down the first thing that comes to mind and go with it. Don’t think too hard. Like Anne …
This is an exercise I used to do with my students, to get the writing motor going. I took the name of it from an excellent book of the same name by Natalie Goldberg. Here’s how the exercise works. Come up with three words or phrases, related to the same theme. Since identity and environment …
For someone who claims to be a writer, and even purports to coach others in writing, I don’t write a whole lot, neither in frequency nor in volume. Seems kind of silly, doesn’t it? Can I say “I am a writer” because that is closest thing to a marketable skill I possess? For a long …