A couple of years ago, I began a morning meditation routine that started on Facebook and somehow migrated to TikTok. I rarely mention my books, maybe make a passing comment to my writing, and concentrate on a word for the day that either inspires or encourages me.
For the past couple of years, I’ve worked on a memoir about the loves in my life, which has been a process I couldn’t have predicted when I wrote the first line. So many questions arose throughout the work (which is almost done — first draft goes to my agent by Labor Day), some of which I anticipated, while others appeared born of the memoir-writing process itself.
I’m living where I always wanted to: a view of the ocean out my windows. Now, I want to share this space with other writers who need to get some work done and might not have the space or funds to do so. I’m opening my second bedroom for certain writers on a donation basis. My way of giving back. I hope that whoever stays here in this place with Izzy and me can write and breathe and relax.
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Sometimes books are written in a matter of months (that hasn’t happened to me, but I have friends who whip books out like they’re as simple to produce as a signature.), and sometimes it takes years. I have several novels I’ve been working on for at least ten years. And then there’s You Are Divine.
Alone every night in that cinderblock house during a frozen upstate New York winter, I realized I was on my own for the first time in my life. No family members to take Jen for a few hours if I needed to work or do errands. No friends around the corner to grouse to at night.
Nehru jackets in thick, scratchy brown wool. Thirty-two-inch bell bottoms my father wore in the Navy. His double-breasted pea jacket, the warmest jacket I’ve ever worn. A Roaring Twenties-style hip-length top over a pleated skirt that came to mid-thigh, pink and ivory colored with stripes accenting the top’s v-neck. A vintage 1940s brown tween winter coat, large circular buttons holding it snug from its skinny waist to its Peter Pan collar. A full-length winter wool, brown monk’s cloak. A floppy pink felt hat. A tan suede fringe jacket with a 12” beaded swing.
Hello, Everyone!
I’ve decided to share some of my previously published essays, since it’s nice to have them all in one place, but I’ll still continue to blog about writing when the spirit moves me, so stay tuned for that, as well. Sometimes I go through phases and write in different genres. I’ve been a novelist for years, but lately, the essay form is luring me once again. More on that later, but for now, here’s an essay I wrote after facing death in the eyes. Nothing tougher, huh?
I’ve been writing since I was nine, and throughout this long, often rocky career, I’ve always dreamed of writing in a house near the beach. I imagined a cold, winter beach, where I was the only person on a long stretch of sand. For me, staring at a stretch of water, preferably one that crashes and roars, permits me to write the stories that have rattled around in my head every day of my life.
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweetbriar accommodates approximately 24 artists on a piece of property that rambles lazily over hills and pastureland. A hundred-year-old stone barn houses studios of all shapes and sizes so that everyone can be satisfactorily creative. Every evening after dinner, the artists, musicians, writers, composers, and artisans who have worked all day on their various projects commune in a room where a piano gets center stage and a fireplace fills one wall. The fire reflects warmly off a wall of sliding glass doors that look spectacular when the fire spreads to the roof . . . but that’s another story.