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Trying to See
As I finished my last blog post, my daughter was quietly singing Billie Holiday’s hit, “I’ll be seeing you.” She sang the last line as I put the coda on my post. After my father’s death, my mentor Jim...
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Writing In My Sleep
Where to begin writing. I awakened with the feeling of having dreamt this writing problem all night long. When I rose at a quarter past six, the driving refrain of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal...
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Truth or Fiction
This startled me: a writing program faculty member stating that she writes nonfiction because it allows her to control how much truth she shares. In fiction, she feels, she has to expose the deep...
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The Brown Box
To the casual observer, the tissue box looks worn, two out of four corners ripped, one side caved in, another mangled. Some Kleenex executive must have returned from Italy enthused about marbleized...
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Happy Birthday, Mom
My mother would have been 97 today. I’m sitting at the laptop in my office in front of a wall cluttered with pictures, my son’s and daughter’s art projects, and Mary Oliver’s poem that ends, “I don’t...
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A Handkerchief Man
A few days ago, a brown Kleenex box triggered a flood of images – all of my father in his last year of life. He had shrunk by then so that we stood eye to eye, his broad shoulders rounded as if...
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