Oklahoma City Memorial: Every Item Had a Story
We visited the Memorial of the Oklahoma City bombing on Thursday. It saddens me how oddly fitting that visit now is given Friday’s rather similar tragedy in Norway. Visits to memorials are always sobering. However, for some reason I always find the collection of objects left by the dead especially heart wrenching. This has been true for me at [...]
Reading: Lingering in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge
I love it when a book becomes a place, an alternate reality I can dwell in. That’s what happened as I was reading Terry Tempest Williams’ now classic memoir Refuge – An Unnatural History of Family and Place. I picked it up in a friend’s guest room last November and read the first few chapters during my visit. They [...]
Writing Exercise: Color List – Blue
Red, white and ____. You guessed it: In honor of Independence Day, the color of this month’s color list is blue. For the uninitiated, the idea here is to come up with ways to capture shades of blue without saying blue because one of the challenges in writing effective descriptions is getting the color just right. Each month on [...]
Hemingway on Writing: Stop When You Still Have Something to Say
Today is the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death. An article by Jeffrey Meyers in the Wall Street Journal on Hemingway’s literary achievement reminded me of that. He died, sadly by his own hand, on July 2, 1961. I thought it would be a fitting tribute to share one of Hemingway’s insights into writing that really made a difference [...]
Writing Letters to my Children
Now that my kids are all away at camp, I’m doing an odd thing: I’m writing them letters. It’s an unfamiliar thing. It feels awkward to recount my daily activities in a letter to my children. Usually they are part of my daily life and whatever happened in a day will be retold at the dinner table or on [...]
My Six Word Dad Memoir
In honor of Father's Day, here are my six words on Dad: "Died too young. Found in pictures." Feel free to add yours!