Archive for the 'Meditations' Category

What a Frog Knows

This morning, I headed down to the pond and caught a frog. I'd never have seen her if she hadn't leaped from the wooden bridge. But when she landed amongst the rocks and ferns, I trapped her with the girls' butterfly net. She was big and made no sound, so I assumed her female, an orangey-brown wood frog with a
Read more…

The Stories That Come to Know You: Hunting with Dad

It isn't solely my truth to hand you, of course, but I believe a story is built of the same dynamic force as relationship. In relating, it expresses and exchanges the same basic electric magnetism, the attractive-repellant force between any two things.   A boy learns about this force at an early age, though he'll never fully understand it, even if he felt
Read more…

How Writers and Editors Are Like Snails

John Updike once wrote that “writers walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves.” (“The Blessed Man of Boston”)     As an editor, I’m fairly gastropod-like myself. I leave my trail of commentary on a manuscript as evidence of where I’ve been (in fact, I may have an even
Read more…

Writing like Mr. Rogers Lived

Just this.   How do you want to be remembered? Just stop for 10 seconds and consider how your words are liberating others today.

Editor to Author: Letter to a Memoir Writer

Dearest Author, I've been thinking about worth lately. What's your story worth? At a recent writers conference I taught a workshop on how I saw publishing changing. Modern publishing, the only time in history when we've had separate "markets" for books, has begun to fracture and redistribute. I've shared several times about how The Shack has shifted things. It isn't
Read more…