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Today, March 20th is, according to NPR, International Happiness Day. I am failing to feel it. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. I am sad even though my life has been fortunate in many ways.
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Most of the people I know are hanging on by the skin of their teeth, as my mother would say. We watch protective positions and entire systems being dismantled, people losing their jobs in a sluggish employment market, lies and more lies. And it’s probably just as well my mom is gone; this current situation…
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I was asked for advice about teaching fiction in a 12-week term. Over the years, I’ve been asked to design curriculum many times, usually by administrators who have never actually done that and don’t appreciate (or care?) the amount of work involved. I have never been paid and rarely even receive a thank-you for doing…
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When I was teaching persuasive writing, I always began with frames—a general structure on which to hang ideas. The 5-paragraph essay I was taught when I was an adolescent seems pretty basic, but it’s not a bad place to start. An introductory paragraph explains the issue and ends with a thesis, the main idea. Three…
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This is a repost from my old blog, QUIET MINDS, in May 4, 2014. Issues with attendance have blown up recently, according to friends still in the classroom. My elementary school friend Ann could not play with me when her father was home because he was a merchant seaman and gone for months at a…
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Since childhood I have read editorials and op-ed pieces on both sides of the political spectrum. Like conservative David Brooks of The New York Times once did, I also read William F. Buckley. As a result, I read newspaper pieces that make me a little crazy sometimes. This morning David Brooks posted “How Trump Will…
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Zora Neale Hurston shaved ten years off her age early in her life, at least partly because circumstances made her entry into college late and she was embarrassed to be a decade older than her freshman peers. But she was also a woman who lived in a society used to women denying their age. She…
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Twenty-twenty-four was a great year for finding my way in editing and understanding my own work on the page. A story, two reviews, and a novel found homes. All of them needed revision after acceptance. It’s the way things work in publishing. I revised. I will be asked to approve edits on that short story.…
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Gary caught me working on this and when I told him it was a new blog post, he said, “Finally!” I had “resolutions” for 2024. Some of those plans fell apart and some went better than I dared hope and shifted my goals. Toward the end of the year I began making plans for 2025.…
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 