Recently I dreamed I was writing furiously on a piece entitled Thirteen Hills. This happened around the time I also was exploring the idea of a thirteen-month year by using the lunar calendar.
When I awoke, I immediately thought of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Of course, birds come to mind when I recall my cats. I didn’t want to prevent them from hunting, but I also didn’t like finding dead birds in my yard or feathers in the garage where the bird had struggled for its life. In many ways I identify with those birds. (more…)
Is it possible to come of age at 60 or 90? Is it ever too late to fulfill your dreams?
I just finished reading Crowley’s The Solitudes with great relief. I haven’t hated a book so much in a long time, but I felt obligated to read it for the reading group I belong to. From the first page, I struggled to get interested in the work, rereading the first 30 pages or so two or three times and still not able to enter it emotionally or intellectually. The clumsy ungrammatical sentences (lots of comma splices) and clunky phrasings made him lose credibility with me from the start. Here are some examples of bad sentence structures: 
Why do I write? Because if I don’t, I feel as if part of myself has checked out. It’s as important to me as food. Okay, it is food, the word like a communion wafer that melts on my tongue, nourishing body and soul. It’s also like having a lover that never loses his attractiveness, beckoning on the fringes of my days, waiting to embrace me. 
For thirty years now one of my favorite teaching topics in memoir classes is showing characters.
I’m not your garden variety Canadian. I don’t own a Hudson’s Bay blanket. I don’t go to hockey games anymore. I’ve stopped being nice. I’m no longer so polite. And I gave up my citizenship when I became an American many years ago. But I can’t seem to shake my country of origins, especially now that Trump has become so enamoured with making Canada the 51st state. It makes me want to give up my American citizenship and leave this country that he’s destroying. But at my age, such a move would be extremely difficult. I’ve lived in the America three times longer than I have in Canada. 
I wish I could get excited about graphic novels. I looked at Maus many years ago and tried to get into it. I couldn’t. I didn’t like having prefab images put my own imagination on hold. I didn’t like the lack of complexity I enjoy so much in a literary novel (no graphics). It was like watching tv in print. Everything is oversimplified. Reduced to its lowest common denominator. 
I first went to work in publishing five decades ago. It was a move I made consciously in order to understand the inner workings of what was then called Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) because I wanted them to publish my work. I started out as an editorial assistant in the department headed by the legendary 
American films tend to follow a three-act story structure with a key turning point at the end of the first and second acts. Memoir has no single formula like that for its structure, though it’s not a free-for-all. There are options to choose from.
During my life, I’ve spent considerable time in therapy, psychoanalysis, and self-reflection, examining dreams, my relationships with people in the external world and with the “little people of the psyche.” 
A writing friend of mine has papered her bathroom with rejection slips. Viewed in that context, they become less weighty and are put into perspective. As writers, we tend to think of rejections from publishers as negative. But rejections also can be gifts in disguise, offering us a way to make lemonade out of lemons.
After I recently published a guest post by Suzanne Sherman on my blog, I responded to her challenge to write nonstop for 10 minutes about why I write. What happened for me confirmed her discovery that “writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.” 
California, even in January, still has spring-like qualities, though April always makes me a little nervous. All that new green showing itself. Flowers. Plants. Reveling in an ecstasy of self-indulgence. For a Canadian, such excess seems suspect. But California, northern California that is, doesn’t care. It just keeps making these spring-like gestures, warming up one day. Cooling the next.
At a New Year’s Eve party, someone asked if I’m writing lately. I said yes, I’m always writing. The next day, I decided to sit down for 10 minutes to explore the reason for my answer. Writing nonstop for 10 minutes on the topic turned out to be another good example of how writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.
Bruno Schulz, the Polish writer, has become my new muse. I’ve been reading his first book, The Street of Crocodiles, and I’m fully captivated. His words and images have such energy that they practically levitate above the page: “A tidy thicket of grasses, weeds, and thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon. The sleeping garden was resonant with flies. The golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seedpods exploded softly like grasshoppers.” 
Betty Jane Hegerat pens stories in the splendid writing community of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where she also teaches, mentors, and offers reading and substantive comment on selective works.
On my blog today, I’m delighted to be in conversation with the lovely Bonnie Lee Black, a woman who has been Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, Central Africa, who has conducted an independent economic development project in Mali, West Africa, and who has been a professional writer and editor for over 40 years. She currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
On my blog today I’m talking to Pat Taub, a family therapist, a journalist, a writer/host for the Syracuse NPR station program “Women’s Voices,”a writer for Key West Magazine, and a writing teacher. Pat explains how her memoir, The Mother of My Invention, helped her make peace with her troubled relationship with her mother.
After Regal House Publishing recently released Cliff Garstang ‘s new novel Oliver’s Travels, I asked him to be a guest author on my blog and sent him some questions about his writing process, including how he comes up with titles, the origins of his characters, literary inspirations, what feeds his writing, how he researches his books, and more.
Joseph Carrabis Bio
“
Bio:
Thanks to author Bobbie Kinkead for sharing the following post with me and my viewers!
If you’re used to me posting something about reading and writing, you may be wondering why my guest interview today is with the visual artist Betsy Kellas. The reason? I think there’s a strong link between painting, sculpture, art installations, and written art, poetry and prose. Both use the line intensively though differently. Both intensely explore our everyday reality. And both use layering to create their effects and to add texture to a work. Here, then, is my interview with Betsy, but I urge you to visit her website and view the range of her artmaking: 
Terry’s bio:
Meet my guest author Terra Ziporyn, fiction and non-fiction writer.
We are so excited to welcome our newest contributor to Writer Unboxed—-Ann-Marie Nieves! Ann-Marie is the founder of the highly respected company 
Leslie Lehr’s Bio:
