Dear Gigi, I chose you after giving it about thirty seconds' thought. You're right up there with Hitler and Jesus and the young me, which is a rather strange party, I admit. Can you imagine the four of us playing Peanut? I just played that game for the first time, by the way. Never played …
Category: on writing
This Happens to be an Excuse
...as to why I'd temporarily abandon my blog. Something happens when you don't write regularly: you get stiff-brain. You believe you don't have anything worthy to say, even though your friends are posting about their new moisture-repelling socks and how potty training's going with the puppy (with pictures). Things, big things, happen, but you neglect …
The Sunshine Blogger Award
Some bloggers reel me in—usually with a strong literary voice and brutal honesty. I'm a sucker for poetic confession. We all struggle inside ourselves, and I appreciate a writer who can fly that flag and call it fiction or essay or Dear Diary... MrHushHush is one such blogger, so when I saw he was looking for …
A Writing Exercise on Mood Creation
Two canoes. With a rope I drag one behind me and return to the place. The empty canoe yaws and straggles and hampers so I have to relearn my paddle. Last time the water was serrated, chopped into spades by homeless and invisible gusts. The sudden rain made the most fragile bubbles when it struck …
My Muse Experience
Anne Lamott calls it her broccoli. Stephen King calls it his beast. My beast was asleep. I tried prodding him, kicking him, calling him bad names. No roars. No lightning bolts of creativity. Just me, slapping words on a page with the precision of a toddler, becoming more and more certain I was wasting my …
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
5000 Words Fall 2018 Short Fiction Winners!
The 5000 Words Fiction Contest is the culmination of our fall class. Students write stories of at least 1000 words, workshop, edit, and post the final drafts to their WordPress sites. Then the students anonymously judge the stories. All I do is tally them! 🙂 As part of our in-class time, students journey through a …
Continue reading 5000 Words Fall 2018 Short Fiction Winners!
Words Bridge the Gap: Cesar Egido Serrano Foundation $20K Prize for #flashfiction
Could you write a hundred-word flash fiction by Thanksgiving? How about for a $20,000 first place prize? Runners-up get a thousand bucks. And it's legit. I checked because you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true. This year's theme is the word, bridging the gap between different cultures and …
Continue reading Words Bridge the Gap: Cesar Egido Serrano Foundation $20K Prize for #flashfiction
It Ain’t Easy Being Real
I'm a laissez-faire teacher, which is something out-of-control teachers say to make themselves feel better. The truth is, I'm more comfortable allowing my students to talk, so long as I can get them to say, with some degree of accuracy, what I was going to say anyway. Today we did a little self discovery. I …
KL Griffiths 