Virginia Woolfe wrote an essay called “The Angel in the House,” explaining that women have to kill the angel voice inside them in order to be powerful writers. Truman Capote didn’t have any problem with that voice. He wrote about anything he felt like writing about with scathing and scalding clarity. Virginia Woolfe never wrote [...]
Category Archives: Writing
Finding What You Weren’t Looking For: Where Research Leads the Writer
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
There’s only one column left of Hera’s temple in Crotone, Italy. To get to it, you walk through a park that has a fraction of the olive trees that once grew in the thick forest that covered the area. The forest is gone. The temple is gone, except for this column and other [...]
The Amazing But True Story of What I Would Be Writing About If I Were Writing
Monday, November 3, 2008
I haven’t done a lot of writing on this website. And yet I’m very grateful to anyone who takes the time to check it out. One problem I have with a blog is that I prefer to use fiction, narrative, to say what I am compelled to say. The [...]
Writing While My Ego Eats Ice Cream
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
For over thirty-six years, I’ve dabbled in Zen Buddhism. For over forty-six years, since fourth grade when I wrote a Christmas poem about the Snow Fairy for my class, I’ve been a writer. These paths do not always converge. Egolessness is a beautiful thing. Buddha taught that all suffering comes from the ego’s desire to [...]