Pregnancy Killed My Creativity

Pregnancy Killed My Creativity

I had fantasies about how hugely creative I would be while pregnant — my body’s creation of a new person would ignite unprecedented levels of inspired creativity for my brain. I never expected how appallingly far off that was. My brain had never before...
21 Ways Writing is Like Menstruating

21 Ways Writing is Like Menstruating

1. It’s never neat and tidy. It doesn’t feel comfortable in clothes. While it hurts, it doesn’t hurt in the typical way but is heavy and low and pulling, like roots — not pleasant but real and necessary and satisfying. 2. It doesn’t ask...
It’s Not Blood That Makes a Family

It’s Not Blood That Makes a Family

On our first date, Lucy told me that she was attending couples counseling with her husband. They were separated, but when they were together their marriage had been open. Recently healed from a broken heart—another married woman who, in the end, did not leave her...
Is this a fiction novel?

Is this a fiction novel?

There is a common ingredient to all writing I find most compelling: soul-baring honesty. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction. Most of what’s considered nonfiction is actually fiction, as it’s necessarily filtered through a perception shaped by...
Real Beauty / Real Tragedy

Real Beauty / Real Tragedy

The accepted convention of what makes a good story is what Joseph Campbell outlined and called The Hero’s Journey. Granted, Campbell argued that this story line, having been mined from the history of world myth and theology, is something hard wired into the...