Some people call me Mom, one calls me Honey, several call me Madame Arbitrator and now all of you can call me Award-Winning Writer! I am honored to announce that I’ve won the 2018 Christopher Hewitt Award for Creative Non-Fiction for my story Custody Visit (1987), excerpted from my memoir. I hope you like it!
Last week, I posted this blog post, Overcoming Barriers to Being A Writer, and got some great responses on Facebook from people who had different barriers than I did. I want to share them, as well as advice that other readers gave. I have some ideas too. Several people noted that a barrier they had when …
I was going to be a writer when I grew up. I remember getting praised for a story I wrote when I was six, and thought I’d want to get that kind of praise for the rest of my life. The story involved rabbits who visited Earth from outer space. I was certain of my …
Seashells are disappearing from the seashore. They have been for years. People have collected them almost out of existence. It’s true that mollusks are always making new ones, but it’s very rare to find shells the size we saw when I was a kid. Meanwhile, hundreds of seashells languish in lamps and jars, or glued …
Last month, in one of those little sidebar articles in The Atlantic, I came across an intriguing idea: That midlife needs to be treated as a distinct developmental period in a person’s life, much the way adolescence is. Historically, there was no such thing as The Teen Years. Children abruptly became adults, accruing responsibilities of …
I am a die-hard New Year’s resolution-maker. Every January (on the first business day of the year to be exact), I review my resolutions from the prior year and make some new ones. I didn’t make very many this year, so I’ve been thinking about making a couple of new ones. But first, I thought …
Most writing books/blogs spend some time talking about writer’s block and how to overcome it, but I had a revelation about writer’s block recently. Writer’s block is the status quo of the human condition. We are all suffering from writer’s block or it’s equivalent at all times that we are not writing (or dancing or …
While I was writing my blog post about memoirs as therapy, I googled the topic, hoping to find a relevant article I’d recently read. Instead, the first item in the search results was an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books with an ex-boyfriend of mine, who, unbeknownst to me, had published his memoir …
When the Powerball lottery jackpot rose to $450 million back in December, I bought a lottery ticket for the first time in more than 20 years. Back in college, my friends and I would give each other scratch-off tickets as birthday gifts, but I’m a grown-up and I know they are a waste of money. …
Spending so much time writing and thinking about writing has led me to the misbegotten certainty that I must know something about it. In service to my newfound expertise, I’ve written a couple of blog posts about it on my Medium blog. The first one is Write Your Own Damn Memoir and the second one …