As a parent who has an opinion about nearly all the things (ha!) I feel strongly that I don’t want my kids out there selling things to other families that we would use in our own house. So about a year ago my friend Talina and I got talking about how we might develop a […]
In a way, nearly every story is a search for home. A protagonist is forced out of a humdrum, lost existence onto a journey where she must grow and change, seek out great mentors, encounter obstacles, and arrive at that point of contentment, or at the very least, transcendence that comes after the greatest battle […]
Here’s something we don’t think about enough in the early weeks of January: Our themes for the year. Themes, as in literature, are overarching principles and ideas learned through life experiences. Think Shakespearean here: Ambition, Love, Generosity, Man vs. Wild, Gratitude, Creativity, Loving Kindness, the list can go on and on. Themes are the takeaway, […]
I’m not exaggerating at all with the title on this one. I got my dream job last December, and I have the Rituals for Living Dreambook Planner to thank, at least partially. Here’s how it happened. At the beginning of each year, I meet my bestie, the poet Stephanie Lenox, for a “Board Meeting.” A […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to set the stage for the release of a book I am writing, an 80s memoir about houses. The bulk of my proposal for this book is finished, but I find myself digging into the section about author platform and thinking (and over-thinking) the many ways I […]
I’ve had my fair share of bouts of insomnia. In some ways it marked the end of childhood for me, knowing I could no longer just fall asleep wherever, whenever. Insomnia is the writer’s curse. It is a situation common to people who spend their waking hours imagining what-if’s and following their thoughts on long […]
So here’s a story that basically encapsulates what it means to write memoir. My family has this zany ritual of visiting open houses but never actually moving. It emerged a lot from our love of spaces and more than a little from our long-held belief that life would be better if yada yada [insert your […]
The other day someone sent me one of those stories where a writer ran back into a flooding building to retrieve his laptop because it had something like a 200,000-word novel stored on it. The first thing I did was shake my little finger and say to myself: “Come on, man, Google Docs!” But even […]
To clear the throat in memoir or not: That is the question. Whether it is nobler to the reader’s mind to have the narrator suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in a book’s first pages or to wait to have the reader take arms against a sea of troubles in the rest of […]
In my quest to discover every place to combine wine tasting and hiking in the continental United States, I found this great winery, Winter’s Hill Estate, on the Willamette Valley Birding Trail.
