This morning began with work on a blog post I’ve had in mind since sometime in May. I took a batch of pictures for it on the first of June, and finally started writing this morning, running late but determined and optimistic. By mid-morning, I had a rough draft and broke off for a quick…
After weeks of grinding away on a recalcitrant chapter for my book project, I am dazed, cranky, frustrated, and thoroughly sick of being in the same room with myself. Deciding that it’s time to get out of my own head, I do what a lot of us do these days when we’re wondering how to…
I often say I write about my home place, but that’s not true all the time. The book project currently consuming my writing energy, for example, is about scientific literacy. (Though it might far afield from the natural history and personal observation focus of this blog, it turns out that scientific literacy is concerned with…
About a decade ago, on the afternoon of October 12, 2007, I turned off South Dakota’s Highway 79 a few miles south of the small town of Hermosa, onto a road called Windbreak Lane. In January of that year I had quit writing, and I was on my way to a writing retreat where I…
First things first: I am not a poet. As I mentioned in my last post, my writerly sensibilities are suited to essays, and that’s where I’ve long staked my claim. If I were to pursue poetry again, I suspect the results would best be characterized using the term my dad used for his writing, which…
I recently dipped my toe into the sub-genre of so-called “flash” or “micro” nonfiction, the defining characteristic of which is an abbreviated word count. I regularly write blog posts in the 700-900 word range, which qualify as flash nonfiction under some definitions, but that length is comfortable for me. I wanted to try something shorter,…
When my husband decided in October that he’d be making a quick trip out of town in early December, I immediately knew what I’d be doing that weekend: an at-home writing retreat. Credit for my inspiration belongs to Linda Hasselstrom, a friend and mentor who has run writing retreats at her South Dakota ranch home…
I walked out of the house with no aim other than to go somewhere and sit: no destination, no errand, not even a camera to box in my attention. I’m not noodling a conundrum from a piece of writing left back on the desk and I’m not on the hunt for sensory titillation that might…
In mid-October, I hit the road for Santa Fe, where I attended the Women Writing the West conference. After a socializing, talking shop, and attending sessions on craft and the business of writing with colleagues for a few days, my husband arrived and we spent an evening on the town before heading out on a…
Back in early June, I packed my too-heavy suitcase (too many books, too much paperwork) and left the horses and the garden and the weeds and the house in care of my husband. I was off to Vermont, to the verdant roll of hills thick with maple and birch, to woods skirted with hay-scented fern…