Certain punctuation and formatting conventions barely get our notice, but omit or cancel any of these and we tend to react. It’s useful to know the rules of punctuating as hammered into you in school – useful so that you know the effects of specific marks, what they can do and more importantly, what they can’t do. If you are in control of it, punctuation is an extension of one’s voice – the tone and flavor of the writing.
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We are a culture obsessed with balance. Don’t upset the balance, eat a balanced diet, monitor your credit card balance, balance the books, your fate lies in the balance, engage in a balancing act between this and that – family and career, life and love, work and play, dreams and reality, balance the equation. The prevailing mantra – don’t get off balance! Read More »
The Off of Balance Read More »
In Wuthering Heights country a few weeks ago, I walked miles in the pelting rain, my green wool scarf the color of the verdant fields wound tightly around my neck. I holed up a week in a romantic stone grange listening to the winds howl through the cracks of the recessed windows. I could write the song of those winds now and the stories that they hold. Read More »
Islands or Moors – Day or Night Read More »
The experience of creating this website may go down as one of my greatest learning experiences. I resisted the idea of having a site for years, thinking all kinds of convincing inaccurate thoughts. This sophisticated form of procrastination allowed me to reconcile not taking the steps required to make it happen i.e. not taking stock of my achievements and non-achievements. I also knew that I didn’t have the marketing and technical skills required for the task. I thought that perhaps I would just wait for the day that I miraculously woke up and had somehow acquired this expertise from the I-Cloud or facsimile! Read More »
Backwards and Forwards Read More »
Art manifests our deepest passion, our unanswered questions and our willingness to walk on shaky ground. Attempting to segregate art from life would be like plucking the stars from the sky, holding the sea from the shore, or eliminating the subtext from your conversation. As Tim O’Brien says of his fictional memoir, The Things They Carried, “…life gives us stuff. It gave Conrad the ocean, which he used in his stories. Life gave Updike domesticity and divorce and the suburbs, which he uses as material. And life dealt me the Vietnam card. Yet I don’t consider myself a Vietnam writer, any more than Morrison considers herself a black writer. We’re writer writers. And we use what life gives us.” Read More »