The following essay was written by Kim Stafford, the poet William Stafford’s son. Kim is an amazing author and teacher in his own right, and if you haven’t read either Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft, or 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoir, I suggest you correct that error […]
Four Elements of a Daily Writing Page in William Stafford’s Practice Read More »
Welcome to the busiest time of the year. The stretch between Thanksgiving and the end of the year is always filled with more responsibility (either festive or otherwise) and more distraction. It would be easy to dismiss the entire month of December as a “do not write zone.” Sure, if you just finished NaNoWriMo and
Last March I finished up the revisions of my second poetry manuscript, and for some time afterwards I felt like an empty bucket. All those poems had been filling the bucket, sloshing around, creating new poems by some sort of mysterious intricate crystallization process. But now, the poems had been poured out onto the page
Filling Your Bucket Read More »
So much pain and despair in the world, so much divisiveness. It is tempting to plunge into easy answers, to see the world filled with simple binaries – good and bad. But to do so robs us of the nuance that every situation is steeped in. When faced with the death of a friend or
Only Connect – Reading and Writing Builds Empathy Read More »
If you write, and if other people find out you are a writer, then you have heard this sentence: “Oh, I always wanted to write a novel (poem, screenplay, short story….), but I never got around to it.” Most often my response to this statement is to nod my head and keep my mouth shut.
That Mythical “Time to Write” Read More »
It’s a gift, isn’t it? This chance we have to interact with our world in words. This chance to build connections between people, between cultures, between those mountains and this shoreline, between the moment when the trees are bare and the moment when the snow begins to fall. Saying It Saying it. Trying to say
Giving Yourself Permission to Write Read More »
I’ll admit that I never really nailed all of the grammar rules until I became a high school English teacher. I firmly believe that the best way to learn something deeply is to teach it to someone else. Good teachers spend time considering their subject from all angles, pulling it apart, and putting it back
Those Who Can, Teach Read More »
John Straley in his natural habitat I sometimes think that I may have a little wisdom to impart about writing, but then I realize that everything I know, I learned from someone else along the way. I would have liked to post the following words and said that they were mine because I believe in
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, or in this case John Straley Read More »
Two-hundred and sixty-five single-spaced pages in 11 point Helvetica font, one inch margins. 170,743 words. These are the statistics of my 2015 journal. The one that I write in each morning for precisely a half hour. I set a timer. Why am I telling you this? Most novels clock in somewhere between 75,000 and 125,000
A half hour each day Read More »
One month. I’ve been Executive Director of 49 Writers for one month. During that time, I’ve been tasked with updating our database. Transferring the information from one donor management software that was no longer available into another. It doesn’t sound like a sexy job does it? It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, spending
Erin Hollowell: A Family Affair Read More »
