I discovered Marilyn Nelson’s powerful stories and amazing poetry -
Carver: A Life in Poems , A Wreath for Emmett Till, and Fortune’s Bones – several years ago.
I’m so pleased to see Nelson’s work spotlighted on The Brown Bookshelf’s: 28 Days Later, 2009 campaign (including her latest, The Freedom Business, which I have yet to read) [...]
I’m in the middle of A Novel First Draft in 70 Days class and have been thinking a lot about process. A while back I posted about the promises we make to our writing selves and a quote I love from the beginning of Mary Oliver’s A Poet’s Handbook about appointments with the muse.
One of [...]
Stephen Fry in The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within has this to say about writing poetry:
“It can take weeks to assemble and polish a single line of poetry… poems take time… they are to be lived with and endlessly revisited.”
Fry could easily be talking about picture books. They take ages to polish and [...]
The other day, Kirby Larson shared a quote by Graham Greene which struck a chord with me: “One does have to accept that one walks in a particular way.”
Wise words. After all, we *do* each have our own particular way of “walking,” our own particular schedules, obligations, lives. And if we want to spend part [...]
I've lived and traveled around the world, but now make my home in California.
By day, I teach; evenings and many weekends, I write.
My teaching, reading, and writing eventually led to a degree in Language and Literacy, and later, an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.