Recent Articles
Deciding which project comes next in the creative life
Kids are away for the weekend, and my husband and I are sitting in our bedroom, with the two whiteboards out, brainstorming what comes next in our creative endeavors. He looks at my side, all those ideas I’ve listed noncommittally, and he says, That looks like a lot....
What I do as a creative is necessary for the world
In thirty-five days I will lose my job. For eight years I have held this position, managing editor who writes articles and designs pages and edits everything between the covers, and I have not interviewed or sent out resumes or seen fit to change careers in all that...
The biggest killer of creativity: comparison
Creatives, we can play a risky game. We fall into the trap of comparison, our work compared to theirs, and we don’t even know their story, how hard that writing was, what that painting looked like when they started, how she had to practice the same move over and over...
Reading is the cornerstone of creativity
I was a just a young girl when I first discovered the wonder of reading. “These words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noise of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of...
How and why I became a writer
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.) I wrote my first book when I was five. It sounded a whole lot like Little House on the Prairie, because my mom had just finished reading the series to me. There were two sisters named Laura and Mary and a ma and pa and a little dog,...
To fiction or to nonfiction?
I heard what they all said. Pick one. Pick one for a major: creative writing or journalism. Pick one for a focus: poetry or real life stories. Pick one for a blog: fiction or nonfiction. It never felt right for me to pick one, but I signed on to the belief that it was...
How to make a dream come true: do.
A dream latched itself to my heart, and it just wouldn’t let go. All through those years, when there was only one and then only two and then three while we waited for four and five, I held my dream in desperate hands, but I never took one step closer to it. And then,...
Write a GREAT Book Even When Your Time is Limited
