Navigating early motherhood is hard. Doing it without your own mother—because she dies unexpectedly while you’re in the throes of it—is perhaps harder. In the wake of loss, middle-aged first-time mom Julie Patterson considers whether grief dramatically changed her children’s personalities, or if her children dramatically changed her grief.
I remember when I started drafting, I was both terrified and excited about where it might lead, what the writing of it might dredge up—emotions, new self-understandings. As writers we know that’s a ‘good place’ to be...
- Bill Marsh
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The gift of nonfiction is the ability to share human experience through story. I find that when I’m most uncomfortable writing my emotional truth, the work has the biggest reaction with readers.
- Lauren Mauldin
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“The pen is not so different from the camera.” Writers and photographers both have the ability to show the world what things look like from their perspectives. We have a lot of power to take what we see and shape it to evoke certain feelings or responses.
- Alexia Kemerling
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The Pond by Nicola Davies is—in hindsight—the book I wish I’d found immediately after my brother died suddenly in February 2001. But even if it had existed then, I probably wouldn’t have found it, because it’s a children’s picture book, and I was an adult without children at the time.
"In the end, we have to feel responsible for our own writing growth, and not fall into "echo chamber" mode, where one school or style may be popular, a handful of authors may appear to dominate a certain writing scene or genre, so we run to those, and then a while later, run to something else that is said to be all the rave."
- Chila Woychik
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Hear what happened when I looked closely at poems with a handful of middle grade elementary teachers and facilitated a discussion about the use of dialogue in one.
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Oh, I wish I’d been born a poet! It does help me remember to go way down, past the scene, past the sentence, down to the word.
- Melissa Goodnight
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