Creative Nonfiction tips from your honorary English Professor — Imagine that we are sitting in a classroom on a crisp autumn day. There are twelve of us sitting at desks that are arranged in a circle. There’s natural light pouring in through large glass windows. You’ve come to learn how to craft creative nonfiction and personal essays. I sit…

She was a trailblazing artist and “wild” woman — Famous 20th-century American artist Georgia O’Keeffe lived an unusual life for a woman born in the 1800s. While she was a revered artist, she also lived a non-conventional life. She married an older man and mentor and she had a love affair with a much younger man. Was Georgia O’Keeffe…

“Creativity comes from thinking differently. Surrounding yourself with new ideas, stepping out of your comfort zone, and shutting the fuck up and listening.” — The creator of Hogan Torah is a satirist, humorist, and memoirist who’s been writing online for over 20 years. His memoir writing is what hooked me, his storytelling chops are immense. You know when you read Hogan Torah that you’re in for a blunt, insightful, and funny ride. This interview…

4/100 albums in 2023 — The Cure’s album Disintegration, remastered from 1989 in 2010 was recommended to me by music writer Kevin Alexander. Disintegration begins with a slow lullaby-like intro song, “Plainsong.” I’ve heard the current historical era we are experiencing described as a time of the “Great Disintegration.” In this way, the album title…

Is this what blog posts used to be like? — Creatives often struggle with imposter syndrome. Many of us are afraid of snakes and avoid them. What if we symbolized imposter syndrome with snakes? What if we faced the symbolic snakes in our life, like imposter syndrome, head-on? Would we make more room for the beauty of creation without its…

Years before EP “Vroom Vroom,” there was True Romance — Charli XCX True Romance (2013) Heads up: This album is full of E (explicit) lyrics I’m a newer listener to Charli XCX. I thought listening to one of her older albums might be enjoyable. It was. I got, as strange as it sounds, echoes of Belinda Carlisle’s 1990s music. “Take My Hand” begins with…

About the “in sickness” part of marriage — People seem to wind up their asses like a Woody Woodpecker windup toy around the new year. This is the second January I’ve been sick half the month. Last year, it was Covid19, which according to me, turned into long covid for about a year. No doctor I asked knew…

From the late 1990s or early aughts — Scratching my pencil into a gray hole widening, deepening, smoothening the jump. If you stare long enough it looks like you can be sucked down into the three-dimensional graphite womb. Stare hard enough and you’ll slip away, slink from senseless small talk teasing, chatting, griping, discovering self-concept escape homie talk…

Enhancing breasts the natural way and coming to love breasts, great, small, and otherwise — From adolescence, I was obsessed with the uneven and too-small-to-my-eye nature of my breasts. When I repeatedly saw adverts in the back of a magazine for an “all-natural” breast enhancer for only…who knows how much? It’s been decades now…more than I should’ve been spending as a poor college student. I…