In the Grand Canyon there is a geologic gap called the Great Unconformity. No fossils exist below this schism. Her timeline has such an unconformity: before age twenty-one, anything that took up physical space and could in theory become a fossil—lost as if by fire. Except the items she chanced to give away beforehand. Those returned …
Category: Personal Journey
To You. From the Turkey
This Thanksgiving, stop. Halt the cooking, put your flour-dusted, pumpkin-splattered ear up to the knobby pink mountain of white meat and listen. As you scoop your third helping of baked marshmallows with a dab of sweet potatoes, and your nether regions fuse to the chair, take note. When your uncle walks in wearing a Make …
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 …
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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 …
How to be a Writer in November: Show up and Throw up
Want to be a writer? It's as easy as show up and throw up. Write stream-of-consciousness. Write garbage. Write your dreams, your fears, somebody else's fears... What often happens in the show-up-throw-up process is: something awesome makes its way onto the page. Inherent in the process is a throwing-off of the shackles of self-loathing and-- …
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P is for Paul, Katae’s Paul
I used to think I was open-minded. Then I had teenagers. And they were... let's just say their tastes veered into the eccentric. My kids, my first two, simply would not play by the rules. And by rules I meant wearing dresses and liking it, using utensils at formal dinners, begging to sing in the …
Cinderella, a Twister #writingexercise
I gave this assignment to my 5000 Words students. Take a fairy tale and either: Re-tell the whole thing in a modern adaptation or Choose a scene from the middle and use it to begin a story of your own that diverges from the original. Sometimes as my students write, I do too. Here's my …
Writing Conference Memoirette
I just attended the Lorain County Library's (awesome!) writer's conference led by Chuck Sambuchino. The most interesting moment of the conference was when Chuck read manuscripts and murdered them in front of us. Until that moment, I'd never actually experienced group tension in the flesh. It was like an invisible spider web stretched across the …
The Things I Carry
"What's it like, being dead?" "...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading." - From Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This quote bowled me over. Not just because it's a fresh look at death, but because it captures my feelings. While I'm writing I Trespass, I'm "inside a …
The Proper Care and Feeding of the Writers in Your Life – Volume 1
Sometimes you stumble across a literary landmine. Blown away. Can I be infused with this man's sense of humor and word sense? Source: The Proper Care and Feeding of the Writers in Your Life – Volume 1
KL Griffiths 