The Writing Life

From IWWG (International Women's Writing Guild):  "On March 30, 1858, Hyman L. Lipman patented the pencil with an attached eraser. I can't help but think of Russell Edson's prose poem, "Erasing Amyloo" . Use Edson's first sentence to launch your own piece about a daughter's experience of being invisible to her father: A father with a huge eraser erases his daughter" Girl Disappeared They all thought it was so cool that my father was a magician. “A real magician!” they squealed at my sixth birthday party. It didn’t get any better over the years. In high school, they wanted him to perform at their birthday parties, wanted him to do more elaborate illusions every time. Who did they think he was, David fucking Blain? Maybe if he had been…. It all happened fast, when you think about it. I fell and skinned my knees one too many times, so he made them disappear. At least they couldn’t hurt anymore when I fell. When I got a l...

Just as there are voices we must not listen to , especially that of our own inner critic, there are other voices we need to hear: those of what I like to call our Soul Posse. These are the people who are always there to listen, who never tell you to give up, and who remind you to remember the best of yourself. In his book On Writing , Stephen King speaks of a time when his mother told him a story he'd written was good enough to be in a book. "Nothing anyone has ever said to me since has made me feel any happier," he writes. I have been blessed with many such moments from friends and loved ones alike. One day my own mom told me in the middle of some pity party I was throwing for myself, that I musn't ever stop writing. An email I received from a friend who is an executive in television production said in of a spec script I'd sent him of New Girls: "If I were hiring for this show, you'd be a staff writer today." And sometimes it's just as sim...

I have let myself be plagued by negative voices my entire life. Notice I said I let myself be plagued. Because that kind of negativity only has the power we give it.  Oh, it was quite a chorus: You'll never amount to anything You must be writing something in all those little notebooks Some of these even took over my own voice and became a toxic Inner Critic: You're not good enough or talented enough. You're just not enough. There were the silent voices which appeared as actions: when my first feature article appeared in an international daily newspaper, my father couldn't find the time to go buy a copy and read it. Another self-proclaimed fan of mine pressed me to read my stuff many times, but wouldn't be bothered to read my magazine article when it came out. Such is life. I thought I'd outdistanced these deflating, hurtful darts. But as it happens to many of us creative types, I was challenged with periods of depression because I'd made so l...