Five Years a Writer

How do you decide when it’s time to stop? When enough is enough? When it’s time to change? Conversely, how do you know that it’s all just fine as it is and that the right thing to do is simply more of the same? I have arrived at a crossroads with this blog. I began it off the side of my desk five years ago; while May 1, 2018 marks the official beginning in my calendar, my staking my claim post was April 15th, my first semi-regular post not until September 30th, and my first public A Post a Day in May series not until the following year on May 1st. Since then, I have found my writing rhythm, my writing voice, and, thanks to you, my readers. When I began the blog, I had a 5-year plan in mind, hence the blog’s name: Five Years a Writer— a five-year-long runway that would see me take off from full-time college teaching to wherever retirement from that would take me. Today, almost two years into retirement and five years after launching the blog, I’m at a decision point: to close up shop...

“Are you stupid?” asked the teacher of the student who had been doing the same practice for a very long time. “I didn’t mean for you to do it forever. I meant for you to do it until you needed to move on.” I have been thinking of this story, which a senior yoga teacher told at a workshop I attended a very long time ago. It was told with equanimity, the teacher having been the student to whom that other teacher had been speaking many years earlier. From the vantage point of time and with the wisdom that comes from both distance and experience, the teacher in front of me used the story to illustrate the value of embracing a practice and the importance of knowing when to let it go. For the past five years, I have written “A Post a Day in May” as part of my writing practice. This year, I am ceasing that practice. It has been a terrific experience — putting myself through the grind of a daily deadline to put myself out there with my writing every single day for thirty-one days in a row, re...

Success comes in many colours: the red-orange brightness of exactly what we wanted; the bold purple of meaningful response from readers; the pale blue of “good effort” or “honourable mention”. And even the flip side of success — the empty bleak greyness of utter silence — can be felt as a win if we place the experience above the result. Over the past six or so months of writing, I have experienced all these colour variations, and I will use this multi-hued record as motivation for my next six months of writing. Red/orange bright: I will have an essay published on Brevity blog  on Wednesday, April 26, which describes my self-styled writing training program of the past few years. This is my third publication on that blog and I am delighted to be in the company of the fine writers from many corners of the globe who appear there. In the ‘it’s gets even better’ category, back in December, I pitched an essay topic to Brevity magazine — and the editor accepted it on the basis of ...

Recently, I was talking with some people about what makes a good life. I said that I think it includes being creative — that creativity is a key component of living well. But no sooner had I said “creative”, than the cry went up:  “I can’t paint.” “I can’t tell stories.” “I can’t draw a stick figure!” “I can’t write.” Fine. Good. No problem. Because being creative is a state of mind, it’s not about drawing or writing or painting. Of course, it can be. But it doesn’t have to be. At its core, being creative means being ok with that state of mind that settles into wondering, into pondering, into noodling on something — or on nothing, come to that. It’s the state of mind that Guy Claxton calls ‘the tortoise mind’. We each have one, just as we each have a ‘hare mind’, also. It’s just that we have most probably most usually been rewarded for living in our hare mind, for being driven by our hare mind. Claxton describes it like this: The hare mind is the problem solver, whi...

  I recently participated in a challenge* to write one 100-word micro memoir every day for five days; each day had a theme that we were encouraged to use as the springboard for our writing. The genre was creative nonfiction, so this challenge was not about inventing stories, but, rather, about going deep into our memory banks to pull on the thread of experiences, big or small, from which to weave stories. If I were to summarize the five stories I wrote, it could go something like this: Once upon a time there was a girl named Amanda, who grew up with cats, so, as an adult, she always had at least one cat in her life. She was good at languages and because she was only 17 when she graduated from high school, she went to France to work as an au pair before returning to Canada to attend university. That first degree got her into a post-graduate journalism program, which she really enjoyed. While she never worked as a front-line journalist, her training became the foundation of her own w...

More and more these days, I understand less and less of what the people on television or radio are saying. It’s not that I cannot hear them. I hear the noise of their speech, but I cannot necessarily make out the words. I find myself railing at them, as if I were an old crone elocution teacher: Speak slowly — or maybe not slowly, but for goodness sake EN-UN-CIATE! I am not talking about accents here. I am talking about make the effort to pronounce the words to ensure that the listener can discern them and, thus, make out the meaning of what you’re saying. It is so frustrating to me that so many broadcasters and podcasters think that having a microphone is enough to transmit their message to me. No. They also need to speak clearly and make the effort, take the time, to translate the noise of their words into meaning for my ears via that microphone. I recently learned that it’s not just me. This 10-minute video on Vox’s YouTube channel explains that the problem of hard-to-hear on-air vo...

In his Lettres Provinciales ,  the French philosopher  and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote:  “I would have written a shorter letter,  but I did not have the time.”    In the second year of my master’s in applied communication, the 50+ students divided quite naturally into two streams: Those who had a core question they wanted to investigate with research and writing into a full-length thesis, and those who preferred to take a broader approach with a selection of courses and one long paper. I was in the second group. For the life of me, I could not come up with one sole question to hold my focus for the final year of study. Instead, one of the profs helped me translate my frustration at the often obtuse and dense articles we had to read into a short-term investigation of discourse conventions across different disciplines. In plain English, this means I investigated how a research paper written by scientists (about the link between exposure to...