ArtWorks elementary school students heard poet James McGrath read from Dreaming Invisible Voices (Sunstone Press). Then the students were asked to write a poem in the voice of an animal or a part of nature. My daughter chose a cobra. COBRA  (from the ArtWorks Poetry Anthology 2012-2013) By Pearl Mariano I sway at the worldAs it goes byI feel the beats asIt goes around and comes aroundI feel the beat of your angerI am the mirror you look intoIf you are calmI am calmAnd we can sway together Kathleen Nakamura’s 3rd GradeEl Dorado Community SchoolSpecial thanks to James McGrath and …

If you haven’t heard Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Ted” talk on creativity, genius, and showing up for work, listen now.

Snippets from a letter to a creative friend: I understand your desire to actualize your best writing.  You know what?  I want to actualize my best writing, too.  Getting published is really irrelevant when it comes to the issue of always trying to do our best storytelling–to let our characters live honestly and fully on the page, and to do their stories justice.   It is a conundrum, my friend, that desire to be the best we can be creatively. We can only do the best we can do at any given time. We can only aim for emotional truth. …

Quote of the day from Alan Watt,  The 90-Day Novel: “Our job as artists is to build a body of work. When we drop our preconceptions about what good writing is and we give ourselves permission to write poorly, everything changes. Permission to write poorly does not produce poor writing, but its opposite. We become a channel for the story that wants to be told through us. Rather than impressing our reader with our important writing, we can impress with our willingness to be truthful on the page.”

I am just back from straddling two worlds–the fictional realm and what appears to be daily reality. I met a major book deadline on Tuesday. Today is Sunday. I still find myself inhabiting an altered state as I come down from the writer’s most seductive high–total immersion in a ‘living’ creative work–and a fiercely demanding and exhausting work schedule. Over the years, I’ve met my share of deadlines for 5 other published novels and many published nonfiction books. This time, over the course of the project, I thought a lot about pacing, psyching up, intervals, training, recovery–terms often used in …

“Make them earn their victories, because we do not care about characters who are saved. We care about characters who save themselves and each other.”     Holly Lisle, author, writing teacher

In the midst of a creative life and after countless conversations with other Creatives, I’ve come to believe that many people understand very little about their creative process and the creative process in general. Expectations–defined and reinforced by social mores–often have to do with achieving goals based on tangible production. For a writer, that means word counts and page counts. But, really, creative process does not bow to our everyday expectations. Writers often talk about “productive days” versus “next to nothing” days. And our idea of what is productive and what is not…well, our conscious, every day, practical minds usually …

“ALL CHANGES, EVEN THE MOST LONGED FOR, HAVE THEIR MELANCHOLY; FOR WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND US IS A PART OF OURSELVES; WE MUST DIE TO ONE LIFE BEFORE WE CAN ENTER ANOTHER.” —ANATOLE FRANCE

“The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”  ~Anais Nin “I’m a terrible cook, but if I could cook, I would see that as art as well, it’s how much creative energy you put into something.”  ~Tracey Emin “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which as cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” ~Henry David Thoreau “If there is a book you really want to read, but …

For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with a series of tech issues that directly effect my ability to communicate with friends around the world. It seemed to begin with my computer’s logic board, now replaced. Then a lightning strike.  Surge protectors handled the worst of that, but then they “died” taking the battery back-ups with them. Once they were replaced, along with a router, I had to replace my wireless phone because of a megaherz conflict. My mail disappeared and reappeared. And then the web server that hosts my domain died for 36 hours. Enough whining… The lessons …