Category Archives: Creativity

Discomfort Required

I’m talking about the kind of discomfort that challenges us, by taking us exactly where we need to go. Audre Lorde, activist and writer, once wrote, “The severe abstinence of the ascetic…is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.” When I read this at the age of 21, the ground shifted beneath my feet. WithContinue reading “Discomfort Required”

The Hardest Kind of Honesty

I tell lies. Whole packs of them. Mostly to myself, but I don’t think that in the least softens the crime. Because once I start to believe them, they get passed off on other people as truths. And then it just gets worse from there. But I don’t count fiction among my lies. Fiction, you’llContinue reading “The Hardest Kind of Honesty”

On Death and Defiance

A few years back I attended a reading by Carolyn Jessop who had escaped a fundamentalist Mormon community. Piled her children in a van in the middle of the night and made a run for it. She’d written her memoir, published as Escape (2008), and now was reading at Third Place Books. She had receivedContinue reading “On Death and Defiance”

Extreme Sport: Facing Your Fears

So I’ve been on a writing retreat with my novel the last few days and am glad to get back to blogging! And from the quiet space of that retreat, I return to say yet again: one of the most terrifying things about the artistic process is its vulnerability. If you’ve ever seen The King’s Speech,Continue reading “Extreme Sport: Facing Your Fears”

The Path of Greatest Resistance

I’ve noticed whenever I start writing a new scene, I feel an initial discomfort. Something in me resists writing it. It’s not a fear of the blank page. It’s something deeper. More like the fear of an empty mind. The discomfort of not knowing what to say. Like the cocktail party where you don’t knowContinue reading “The Path of Greatest Resistance”