Sometimes I think the moon is my muse, or is it the moon that brings the muse out in me? I can write without the muse, but it’s like using a hose to water my garden when it really needs a soaking rain ~ From Muses Like Moonlight by Colleen. I’ve discovered that driving to […]
The thing the critics don’t get about me is the fact that I’m Irish ~ Eugene O’Neill When I went to Ireland in 1997 to visit my grandmother’s hometown, I learned more about myself there than I could have in 10 years of psycho-therapy. The majority of the Irish people I met reminded me of […]
I get nervous when I draw attention to myself. My hands shake when I open a Roanoke Times newspaper and know that a political commentary I wrote is inside. When the local newspaper did a story about my first book, I felt like a girl in my first training bra that the whole town knew […]
Death is real. It comes without warning. No one escapes it. Soon my body will be a corpse!” ~ A Buddhist passage When my brother Jimmy died unexpectedly 3 years ago, I wrote his eulogy. My brother Danny died a month later and I wrote a poem describing how removing his breathing tube, IV, and […]
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” ~ Robert Benchley It only takes having one child to make parent. Following that logic, one might assume that one paid-for-published piece of writing would make one […]
“I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.” Natalie Goldberg In “Muses Like Moonlight,” my first collection of poetry and essays on writing, I wrote… “Who can I bill for the 8 hours it took […]
Rejection slip for ”The Diary of Anne Frank” – The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ”curiosity” level. I submitted an essay to The Sun Magazine last week. Yesterday my husband noticed a typo in a copy of the already sent cover […]
1. “Are you digging the snow? was my preferred line all day yesterday after 5 inches of the white stuff fell on us, here in Floyd County. I used it on everyone I spoke with, online or otherwise. It started out innocently enough in a blog comment I made to Doug, after viewing his photos […]
10:00 a.m. – Are you familiar with the impatient weight in your fingers when you have a post “copy” to “paste” but have nowhere to paste it? And what did you do with your time when you couldn’t get on the blogger.com site all of last night and so far all morning to post today’s […]
