Trayvon Martin (Feb. 5, 1995 – Feb. 26, 2012) should have celebrated his 19th birthday today. Two years after his death, I find myself still thinking of him. I think about who he might be now (who was I at 19?), I think about his parents’ battle for justice, I think about the stupid insanity … Continue reading
Dear anyone who reads this blog, I decided to start this blog to force myself to write what I know. My writing is not perfect, and it has taken me YEARS for me to make peace with that. It has taken a long, long time to summon the courage to write, to feel like I … Continue reading
Teaching writing is like cracking a code. There are no magic tricks, no simple formulas, one suggestion/solution does not work for all students at any point. Finding your ability to write is a weird, twisted, and strange journey of self-discovery. I can teach paragraphing, sentence structure, thesis formation until I fall over (and I probably … Continue reading
Today I should post about writing, and here I sit on the train home from work, 10:32 at night, composing this on my phone because I was too busy writing! But not fun writing, my friends, I was… …GRANT WRITING (insert shriek of agony here). And because I haven’t learned diddly-squat after a lifetime of … Continue reading
“Write like a motherfucker” is a quote from Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar. Dear Sugar is an advice column she wrote under the pen name of Sugar for the online literary journal The Rumpus. If you read this post of mine back at the end of … Continue reading
The National Day on Writing is this week. Strangely, it’s on October 20th (a Saturday–huh?What’s up with that?), but here at my institution, The New Community College, we are celebrating it all. week. long. I have been too busy to write here because I have been so entrenched in figuring out just who is in … Continue reading
Today marks sixteen years since my dad passed away. Diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes around 1950, it is pretty amazing that he lived until 1996, until he was 61 years old. He was a diabetic for years before individuals tested their own blood sugar by pricking their fingers at home. Since his insulin shots were … Continue reading
When I first learned of the tragedy that happened on February 26, in Sanford, Florida, when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman and the catalog of unfathomable events that have unraveled since then, I was shocked, hurt, and felt an ache in my chest cavity as a mother. Even though my son is a … Continue reading
