Archive for the ‘writing’ Category
Joseph Foley over at WPMUDev recently suggested a handful of WordPress plugins for tracking NaNoWriMo progress on a WordPress blog. I’d like to suggest one more helpful NaNoWriMo plugin. This one’s not for progress-tracking, but for publishing the final content once the month is over (or, for churning out those chapter-by-chapter pdfs that you can [...]
Recently I came across the Impossible Things blog through the story of the author’s coffeeshop interaction with Russell Kirsch. I poked around the site a bit and was impressed with the author’s verve. I’m the kind of person who likes big challenges, and doing “impossible things” seems a great approach to life. Perhaps what I [...]
From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, by Terry Tempest Williams: I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin [...]
(h/t Jen Grey) “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own [...]
At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write prose, and I understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn’t do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to [...]
I was re-reading some of my older writing recently in preparation for an art workshop at UCBerkeley this week and found this old recording of me reading my creative nonfiction story Pose [pdf download]. How odd it sounds to me to hear my voice. Like it’s me, but not me. As I listen I hear [...]
I’ve begun various narratives about my trip to Europe and either deleted them or kept them in the drafts file. I’m finding it hard to write the whole story of that experience and what it meant to me. Having been burned a bit by storytelling–especially the impulse to create a tidy, pretty narrative out of [...]
A conversation with a friend about surgical pain prompted me to resurrect this older post that never made it out of my drafts folder. It’s a rather stream-of-consciousness piece, a musing on my own relationship to pain. “It’s kind of freaky the way you smile when you tell me these things,” he said, stopping me [...]
I am drawn to people with passion and vision. That’s much of the reason that I started my podcast–because I wanted to have conversation with people who share my history-lust. Talking to such people causes me to fall in love with my chosen profession (and the whole entire world, for that matter) all over again. [...]
A historian friend just placed piece of writing on the Huffington Post, discussing tomorrow’s elections in South Africa. The immediacy with which she conceived the idea for the article and shopped it to HuffPo (all happening within a matter of days) shows just how seductive web publishing can be. If Laura were to write an [...]
This week I’m attending some writing workshops with a visiting scholar/author. As part of that, I’ve imagined collecting many of my blogposts into a book, organizing them thematically and with extended essays introducing the various sections. I wrote the section below to tell the story of three separate visits to Denver–each about a decade apart. [...]
I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I share my photos, my web content and my podcasts with CC licensing, which means that you’re free to use my stuff, but you’ve got to give me credit if you do so. Sure I know that people ‘steal’ my pics sometimes–it happens most often with pics of me [...]
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