Sanity

Immediate apology: this is not about going crazy. It’s about getting sane. I know that’s less interesting. But: some people like to read about how sanity can return. Especially the currently insane. If you’re not insane, and think you could never be, or that no tough, clever person could ever go crazy, then you can […]

Poetry

I remember phrases from childhood travels, not images or events. Glass-bottomed boat. Lion Country Safari. Circus Circus. The musicality of the words meant more to me than the actual experiences. All I remember about the glass-bottomed boat was my incredulousness. How could a boat have a glass bottom? I pictured a little motorboat with a […]

Brown and Green

Most of us are brown and green. Like the bushes I saw tonight. Parts are brown, crumbly, forgettable. And parts are green, new, juicy, exciting. Living things are also partly dead. I’ve been trying to get my creative writing students to write descriptive detail. So I noticed, on my walk tonight, that forsythia has petals […]

Unicorn

She couldn’t walk, and she yearned for an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. This was at the tail end of the OED existing in book form. All those huge, expensive, books, guarding the history of English like a dragon. She taught me what it was, and then I loved it, too. She was stuck in a […]