Five Years a Writer

This photo of Joan Didion and the quote was the "spark" for my super-short story The world is mad with delusions of power and horrifying invasions, but this past Sunday saw me step away from that roiling mess of humanity for a 2-hour break to focus on telling stories. It was so much fun. I am co-leading a 4-week course called Spark Your Writing, with my creative collaborator, Deborah Schnitzer. Each week, we send out a ‘spark’ (a prompt) to the participants and they have the week to write something in response to it. On Sunday afternoon, we gather via Zoom to share what we’ve produced. In a time of great destruction, it is both nurturing and necessary to connect with our creative capacity and put our energy into making art. Writing stories is one way of doing that. I have spent years and years saying, 'I don’t write fiction'. But last week’s spark got me going and sent me down a road I don’t usually travel in my writing: I wrote a fictional short story. A super-sho