I am writing this blog post in early 2022, but it is meant to stand in for all the posts I didn’t write in the two years between March 2020 (when the 🦠hit the fan) and now. I speak for many working mothers when I say that March 13, 2020 was the day when any breathing …
When I was 19 years old, I started writing a novel about a tattoo artist named Gina Mulley. Over many years and 15+ drafts, almost everything about the book has changed. But its soul is intact, and Gina Mulley the tattoo artist is still here, and I’m here too, with this good news: My novel, Jobs …
NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. Never done it! Going to try it. For six weeks now, I’ve been creating these little meditations on how to return to center when we’re distressed, dispersed and distracted. Writing fiction is a centering practice for me. I start to feel weird and cranky when I’m not doing it. Which is …
What—another rough news week? (Gosh, I am shocked, shocked.) So it turns out we’ve got twelve years to get serious about climate change. In other words: My little boy just started pre-K, and by the time he reaches tenth grade, we need some serious environmental come-to-Jesus. Everybody registered to vote? ℘℘℘ On the subject of listening …
These are the last days of summer, whatever the schoolbuses, candle stores, and Pumpkin Ales may tell you. Don’t be rushed by the makers of seasonal markers: This is the liminal space of crickets and figs ripening. The ripening, too, of summer musings into autumn doings. Interesting things happen in middle-times. Liminal spaces are an …
If I’ve been posting seldomly, it’s because I’ve been living muchly. Expect some posts soon with juicy details on the following: Lady tattooers and bizarre coincidences. I’ve been overhauling my novel again. It’s about a young woman aspiring to become a tattoo artist in the mid-1980s, when there were few women in the field. Recently …
I guess I’ll start with the Christmas cards. Most years, if I even manage to get cards out, I make them myself. Last-minute. Stapled together with a couple of Instagram pictures printed out on our low-toner inkjet. I actually like it this way. Punk Rawk Xmas! We’d never had a professional family portrait, until a few …
Perhaps you know that special suffocating effect of 763 toys? (By the way, this is Part 2 of a brief series called The Art of Deletion—editing a piece of writing down to its essential core.) It doesn’t matter how much you vow to raise your child in spacious, creative simplicity. Well meaning relatives cannot allow …