Take Back Your Life!

I’m doing a lot of meaningful things in my life. A complete 180 from my late teens and twenties when I did almost nothing meaningful. Depression followed me around back then. I’m convinced that for me a lack of a meaningFULL life brought it on. Those were grey days, for sure. I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning the phrase, “meaningful life.” Always, “make money” or “get good grades” or other such empty silliness. What do good grades mean? I never quite got that one. (more…)

I graduated 6 months early from high school and waitressed full-time at a chain restaurant before going to college. It was going to be my spending money.

What a great life experience! I often worked with single mothers trying to support their children or young women putting themselves through college. One mother was downright hilarious. We yacked it up all the time when it was slow. She had a lot of funny mother stories. I learned first hand how hard some folks have to work to bring home the bacon.

Initially, I was the worst waitress and my supervisor “Wanda” always had terse words for me. I could barely handle 1 table let alone the 6 she routinely gave me. (more…)

I’ve been reading the words of Marina Keegan, a young woman from my hometown who died over the weekend. She had just graduated from Yale and had a writing job waiting for her at The New Yorker. I’ve got one word to describe Marina: phenomenal.

She cared about people, about changing the world, about community, about doing good, about writing from the heart, about living every minute she was alive.

God, we need more people like her. To think there is one less, gets me all choked up. (more…)

Advice often gets a bad rap. People advise you not listen to advice, which is, of course, advice.

Yet, words of wisdom from another person often make our journey on earth much easier. They may have already experienced something you are going through now. Or, they’ve lived longer and know what worked for them during the more trying times of life. While some advice may not be right for you, other advice may be. (more…)

Magic has surfaced as a theme for the writers taking my latest Story Circle On-line writing adventure: Grab Life By The Writing Gusto.

I believe Magic exists, we just learn to filter it out on our slog to the “Real World,” which of course is anything but real. Truth continues to be stranger than fiction, so I’m not sure why we continue to train the young for the real world when that’s not in our best self-interest.

Someone said to me that the title for my class wasn’t possible, that you couldn’t grab life by the writing gusto.

Why not? That’s how ingrained folks are to sort everything into real and not real. (more…)

Hello caring and loving readers,

I’ve been asked by the lovely and compassionate Hannah Brencher to write a love letter to “Elizabeth” during the More Love Letters “12 Days Of Love Letter Writing.” Hannah and I met on one of our blogs several years ago and discovered that we cared about the plight of others. After college, she went to NYC to do an internship concerned with poverty.

There while riding the subway, she got an idea to write anonymous love letters. On her site Hannah says, “I was struggling to get out of bed every morning and I needed an escape from my own sadness and loneliness. So I began writing letters on the train to individuals who seemed like they, too, could use a boost. And it healed me. It really healed me.” (more…)

Hello all,

Billy Jack post needs to wait another week. After I perused my latest copy of Newsweek and the local paper, I felt compelled to write about the state of the United States.

46.2 million Americans now live in poverty. (15.1%, same as 1993, which I find fascinating. Was that a bad time then? Don’t think so.)

59 million do not have health insurance. (more…)

I’m not sure any of my essays would have been published if I’d given up.

Submissions got lost. Email got deleted. Editors got deluged.

If you care about your writing and want it to be published, then you need to keep sending it out and following up. But don’t follow up with, “I’m following up.” Follow up with more reasons why your essay or story will connect with the publication’s readers or with a new essay.  Sometimes it’s easier to sell the older one by getting your foot in the door with a newer one. (more…)

There’s a lot of self-loathing in the world. Lots of folks who don’t love or even like themselves.

I used to be one of them.

It’s hard to say for sure, but I don’t believe I entered the world disliking myself. That self-horror emerged along the way, beginning most likely when I entered first grade and the judgments began. (more…)

Hello friends,

I awoke to an odd telephone call this morning.

An old, rarely used email account had been hijacked by some folks with too much time on their hands. They had sent an email to all my contacts pretending to be me. They told everyone I’d been robbed at gunpoint in England and my family needed 1,600 pounds sterling ($2,600 in US dollars) to pay off our hotel bill and purchase airline tickets to get home. (more…)