What I’m Learning: Part Four

what-im-learning-4

There’s so much to learn, and so much to know.

As I try to grasp why my daughter was so grossly misdiagnosed by doctors and why so many of them failed to see me as a potential partner in her care, the best way I know how to access some clarity is to read and listen. Of all the things I’ve felt about our experiences, I’ve never felt alone. Whether I knew it or not, there were people all over the world joined to us energetically in our fear, our resentment, our minor and major victories. Every time I tell a story about us at a Moth story slam, I’m approached by strangers who say, “wow, you too?”

So, I keep telling, and I keep reading the tales of others. I’ve been reading and reading and reading this last few years. Here are two books I’ve read over the summer and early fall, and what they made me think.

Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather

Lessons from Anne Lamott

words

This summer, as I finished working on the proposal for my memoir, I took breaks to listen to a recording of Anne Lamott’s talk at Book Passage University at 2019. With my kids in school and dinner not planned yet and laundry piling in every hamper, I swallowed hard when she said this:

“What we spent a lot of the class on before was why people couldn’t be expected to write all that much YET, but as soon as the husband retired, as soon as the last kid left high school and moved out, as soon as they move to the Russian River…and we would always say ‘Thank you for sharing. You won’t write then either.'”

Unwittingly, I’ve taken this to heart in the last four years, dragging myself covered with dusty words and moldy habits back into a writing practice. I’m not as disciplined as Anne, who insists we all need an hour a day, but I’ve been solidly thrashing the cobwebs off my voice at least a few times weekly for years now. I’m about to turn forty-five, and to show for my lifetime of writing words, I have a lovely small collection of bylines which you can (*should*) read, a completed memoir manuscript, a completed book proposal (agents, reach out to me, please!), and a few hundred dollars.  Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather