I’ve become a knitter. I’ve learned alongside my mentor, Stacie, who says things like, “It’s not hard. It’s just about making loops. Loops and loops.” Over the past year, I’ve progressed from making scarves to knitting a sweater, which I’m…
I lost nearly all my sense of smell when I was eight. One day my socks itched and the next day I was allergic to seemingly everything including “all grasses in the world,” the grim doctor intoned, putting the kybosh…
The cliché of the depressed writer can seem almost romantic to someone who has never tried to put pen to paper or been in the thrall of senseless emotional suffering. But for those of us who wish to write, depression…
In my younger and more vulnerable years, a writing instructor gave me a piece of advice I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since: “Be careful,” she said. “Every time that you interact with another person, you’re entering into…
My daughter first sang in public when she was three years old. I can still see her in a dark-flowered dress, fearlessly belting out “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in a husky voice that someone once referred to as a whiskey…
Stories, with their powers to transport us to distant lands and imagine ourselves as others, are magical. But I’ll tell you a secret. The writing of stories is not magic. Writers are regular people. They are regular people who are…