Five Years a Writer

  It’s self-evident, of course: The more you roam with a certain pack, the more of them you’ll see. So it is for me these days. Everywhere I look, I see story-tellers, writers, authors. They are not behind the barrier of celebrity and distance. They are right there on my screen, right here in my own community, available, accessible, welcoming. Some of them write short posts on Facebook or Instagram, but many of them put their writing out into the world through more formal channels — blogs, online magazines or websites, and also in book form — actual books with covers and paper pages, published by a press or self-published, either way available for purchase. But writing and publishing the story is one thing (two things, really), actively promoting it to find readers is another thing entirely. Google throws up 1.2 billion hits in response to a search for “books published but not promoted”, the top hits making clear it is nigh on impossible for your work to find readers if you don’t ...

Amanda, age 1. Anne. Katy, my older sister. We each have a story to tell and, says Anne Lamott of Bird by Bird writing advice fame, we are not responsible for hurt feelings of those who disagree with how we tell it. Nonetheless, I asked my mother recently to read a piece about my father that I plan to submit to an online magazine for a themed issue on fathers. I was relieved when she gave me her blessing on the content and was appreciative of her feedback on the style in which I had written, though I disagreed with her comments on that point. It was a fine moment of respectful difference we shared as writers not as mother and daughter, and I will continue to work on the piece for submission next month. As I am, so is my mother a writer. My mother is a writer and I have become one, too. Either sentence is true, though each tells the story from a slightly different perspective. The result is the same: We are both writers. Would I be a writer if she were not? Would she be writing the fou...

It’s a few days after the coronation of King Charles III, and my thoughts are filled with pageantry and ritual, acceptance and rejection, and with roles and responsibilities. Filled, also, with history unwinding over the centuries and 21st century commentary thereon. Many see in black & white, but I quite like lingering in the grey in between. Where patience and perspective reside, even while acknowledging that reason and equity and evolution knock on them with the urgency of change. As I linger in the grey, I have written  “ By a whisker ”, a 100-word  piece of nonsense (below)  to mark the occasion of the placing of the crown on the head of a mere-mortal man whose birth landed him with a load more significant than any I would ever wish to bear. By a whisker I loved polishing the stones, rubbing against them to bring out the shine. But I don’t like to work long hours, so, over the months since September 8, 2022, I did it in bursts, as the mood struck me. Then I overh...

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...