If you squint and look closely you’ll see a rainbow arching behind Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge in this photo. It blazed across the sky after one of those December deluges that leaves your pants soaked to the knees–even though you’re carrying an umbrella which has probably turned inside out anyway. Rainbows are like finished stories. You’ve…
Category: Inspiration
Things to help you keep moving toward your dreams.
Chai and Chi
One of the most interesting parts of working in cafés is the opportunity to overhear conversations. This afternoon, the background “music” for my pot of eggnog chai (total yum!) was a Portlander who was fretting over how badly his “chi” was affecting his ability to grow his business. If he could just get his chi…
Former Chautauquan Wins National Book Award
There’s no news quite as wonderful is learning that one of our writing “peeps” has grabbed the brass ring. Kathryn Erskine, who attended the Highlights Foundation Writers Workshop at Chautauqua as well as taking part in at least one Founders Workshop at Boyds Mills just won the National Book Award in the children’s category for…
Meticulosity
The word for today’s post is meticulosity. It means “taking extreme care over the details.” It’s the word that came to mind when I looked down on the luminous mandala you see in this photo. Drepung Loseling monks from South India created this intricate sand mandala in the Collins Gallery of the Multnomah County Library here…
Who Will You Thank?
I just finished reading Libba Bray‘s Going Bovine. What a ride! It’s about a teen who gets mad cow disease and goes on the road trip of his life in search of a cure. If you’re up for physics mixed with myth mixed with music and don’t mind a bit of head-spinning along the way,…
Say “Yes” to Your Writing!
A very accomplished author friend of mine recently sent me an email in which she told me she’d just received a contract for a picture book. She mentioned how relieved she was, after months of waiting, to finally have a new contract. An illustrator friend (with more than fifty books to his credit) told me…
Dear Eva, Thanks for All the Aunts!
One of my favorite children’s book authors, Eva Ibbotson, has passed away at age 85. In reading an interview she gave not long before her death, I found this quote about the publication of her first book (which I hope will encourage all the yet-to-publish): “I must have been nearly 50 before it was published. I…
What “About Me”?
I read a lot of authors’ “About Me” pages on the Net, and I always read the author information on jacket flaps of the books I love. As a kid, I didn’t have a clue where books came from . . . that name on the front or the spine was simply a way to…
A Favorite Chautauqua Quote
While pulling together bios for this year’s Chautauqua attendees, I became entranced by this quote from Dora Yuet Lan Tsang of Hong Kong: My best advice came from Max, a seven-year-old. One day I asked, “Max, when you grow up, what would you like to become?” Bewildered, he frowned and answered, “Of course, I would…
Ritual and Writing
I wrote the post below when I lived in Portland, Oregon. Re-reading it just now I realized several things: 1) I really miss living in a city with so much diversity, and 2) I have yet to put into place the daily rituals I need to show gratitude for my current writing places and spaces….
Bespectacled & Bookish 