Tag: blog

A Post Hop

Budding artist/writer

Now that the October Memoir Challenge is done, I thought it might be a good time to give you a tour of various kinds of posts at The Writerly Life. If you started following the blog during the challenge, you may be surprised to find out there’s more here than memoir–posts about writing, reading, photography, even the cat . . .

Thanks to Kenya G. Johnson for passing along this archive hop idea (via TALU (Tuesday Archive Linkup).

1) Here’s a two-parter for writers: Read It and Weep (Not), a piece about how to respond to criticism (as reader), and Read It and Weep (Not), Part 2: The Writer’s Role.

2) Wordle 65: A Little Fiction. I love the Wordles from The Sunday Whirl. Sometimes the words want to be poems, sometimes a story. This one is a piece of flash fiction.

3) So Many Streets, So Many Connections. A piece about friendships of all kinds, from memory to cyberspace.

4) The Letter That Crisscrossed the World. A bit of family history that lends itself to story.

5) And finally, from the Memoir Challenge: Age Seventeen: On the Cusp. Quite an important age, seventeen . . .

Enjoy the sampler and give me your thoughts. Suggest a topic you might like to see!

Starting Tomorrow: October Challenges!

Bring ’em on—the October challenges, that is! Starting tomorrow, I’ll participate in two writing challenges of different sorts.

 

The Submit-O-Rama is the brainchild of Khara House, poet/blogger extraordinaire at Our Lost Jungle. Khara has offered several levels of commitment so we can submit our work during October at a rate we’re comfortable with. I’m going with the one I think I’m most likely to do–the Submit-O-Rama Choice Challenge–wherein I make my own rules. And my rules will be to submit one story a week over the next month–not the same story each time!

 

 

My parents, before I was born.

 

 

The other challenge I’m subscribing to of my own free will is the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge hosted by Jane Ann McLachlan at Join the Conversation. You’ll learn more about this one and my motivation for participating when you read the first memory blog post tomorrow: a memory before the age of two! Jane Ann has encouraged us to be creative, so we’ll see how it goes.

 

 

Both of these challenges are great practices for the writing life!

Visit Khara and/or Jane Ann and join in the fun. It’s not too late! And please do come back here tomorrow to see where the memory lane leads me first!

 

 

Monday Discovery—Link to Mixed Metaphor: “Intersections”

Today’s discovery?

I’m keeping it in the family and sharing the link to my daughter-in-law Larissa Parson‘s blog entry, “Intersections,” posted Friday, September 7.  She doesn’t get to post as often as she would like. Here’s why:

Larissa teaches English at a private high school in San Francisco. And she and husband Geoff (my husband’s son) are the proud parents of 20-month-old twin boys!

Busy? 

You bet. But occasionally, she shares her life and wisdom on her Mixed Metaphor blog. In this most recent post, she writes about how her teaching life intersects with her life as a mom–how each experience informs the other. Here’s a taste:

Communicating with our children in a respectful way about what the boundaries and rules are and are not frees them to explore their world. And I’ve seen for myself how amazingly effective this practice is. I’ve become the unhelpful mommy on the playground; if they can’t get on it themselves, they can’t do it (Except for swings. Because swings are so fun.) . . . .

I want to try to bring the same empathy I practice with my kids to my classroom. I want to meet students where they are and understand what’s frustrating about a tough text, and celebrate what’s great about understanding a tough text . . . .

Here are Larissa’s primary “informers” at home.

Twins, wrestling
Photo courtesy of Larissa Parson