When I decided to self-publish my novel I knew that I would have to set up a website on which I would post blogs. The basis of any website involves dispensing useful information. We do this through writing blog posts. Much like fellow classmates in my MFA Program in Creative Writing at Goddard College when […]
Promises to Myself, Blogging, and Passion… Read More »
I like blogging for several reasons, the first of which is that it strengthens my writing. It’s often hard for fiction writers to commit to blogging on a regular basis. Much of our resistance comes from our dedication to crafting and refining our stories and novel. It takes time, a lot, to draft and revise
Blogging, Resistance, and Developing Discipline… Read More »
Most often the recipients of these injurious actions and words we commit constitute that group of people closest to us, daughters, sons, mothers, wives, husbands, fathers, co-workers, professional partners and colleagues, classmates, students, employees, those subordinate, lateral and even sometimes superior in professional rank to us.
Why do we do it?
Injurious Actions, Political Dictators, and Near Sadist Employers… Read More »
The hardest thing about being a mother is that you never feel as though you’ve done enough. So many nights I go to bed wondering, pondering, construing and often, I am sure, miscontruing, how I might have done better at something for or with my one of my children.
It’s particularly hard when you witness your child struggling to accomplish or overcome an obstacle.
Bullies at school, teachers who seemed to have landed from a planet where all inhabitants have forgotten what it was like, or just how difficult it is to be a child. To be sure, growing up is hard to do.
Mothers, Hope, and the words, “I’m sorry…” Read More »
There is a Dream dreaming us.
–African Bushman
(The Mystic Vision–Daily Encounters with the Divine, Compiled by Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring)
How often do I create characters, work with them in uncovering their stories and personalities as I put write them on the page only to then meet a person who within seconds I recognize as one of my characters in a novel?
Very.
Of course these people have most often been around since long before I wrote or even conceived of the story to my novel, and its characters. I have not breathed them into life. And yet a connection exists between what we write and the life around us.
Let’s say for instance that the people I meet who remind me of characters I have created or who have emerged in my stories, have risen in some sense, from my novels.
What would that mean, that we as writers create characters whom we will then encounter in the physical form of human individuals through engagements and interactions and life?
And let’s say these people do not know, have no understanding or awareness that we are their creator.
African Bushmen, God, and Reality in Writing… Read More »
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.–
Howard Thurman, African American mystic
So much of what we do as writers extends from, if not flows out of the voice of our genuine and authentic self. The genuine of which Thurman speaks holds both the key to what we write, and our ability and commitment to writing the words of our hearts as delivered to us through the various dimensions of life that channel into and through us.
At a time when so much about and within our society seeks to silence the genuine, what is honest, unfettered and pure, writers of today stand upon the threshold of a new day. It is a dawning, not unlike times and past eras where old paradigms shifted and some fell in the wake of new ones arising.
The Genuine, Truth and Liberation.. Read More »
This weekend I saw the movie, “My Name is Khan”. It was a lovely, entertaining and deeply moving experience for both me and my husband.
For writers unfamiliar with Bollywood movies, I high recommend beginning to watch them.
Though long, they are a wonderful artistic creation to behold. As with any art form, not all are excellent.
A significant number have moved and restored hope to my consciousness over the last decade such that I now have a collection of around 100 DVD’s of various Bollywood movies.
My children, ages 10 years to 23 years love them and even purchase their own. Through a contract made with Fox/Searchlight Pictures, Bollywood, located in Mumbhai, India, will now have its films shown on the big screen throughout America.
This is a wonderful venture that ideally will lift the craft of American movie-making from the dearth of ideas and imagination.
‘My Name is Khan’, Bollywood, and Writing… Read More »