About Me

I'm a freelance writer (much published), a cornbread-loving, genre-bending 56 year-old. Writing is work, play, the way I make much of my living. It's occasionally highly anxious-making, always surprising. I teach, and am constantly taught by, writing.

My published work includes fiction (novels, a few short stories), cookbooks, memoir, poetry, children's books, magazine articles. My unpublished work contains a lot of rough drafts of the previous, plus countless other writing pursued for fun, self-knowledge, curiosity, experimentation, out of pique. There is no limit to what the act of writing does for the writer. It is a generous discipline.

I live on 35 acres in Vermont, after having spent 33 years in small-town Arkansas (but probably not what you think of as "small-town Arkansas.").

I still haven't decided if I'm a Yankee Southerner or a Southern Yankee. My social and personal style is pretty firmly Southern --- the personal and easygoing warmth that is often labeled "Southern hospitality" is no lie, and I think Southern speech is the single richest American idiomatic language.

But my politics are right at home in this bluest of green states, Vermont, where I have learned what civic hospitality and functionality look like. While I considered it the greatest of compliments when even after I moved north, my friend Mary Gay Shipley, who owns That Bookstore in Blytheville, (Arkansas), said to me, "We still claim you," I have to say I love agreeing with almost every Vermont bumper-sticker I see, and the fact that they just come plow and grade your road --- you don't have to call the county and grovel.

My current residence is what was for many years my aunt's summer place in Vermont. She's now 99; I'm buying it from her (I have a hefty double mortgage that, as I like to say, was done with "financing so creative I should have gotten a MacArthur for it." )

Here, there are moose, deer, bear, foxes, beaver, porcupines. Winters are long, but not as long as I feared they would be when I lived in the South and was contemplating moving here. I've learned to snow-shoe; I go on a bundled-up horse-drawn sleigh ride at a nearby farm, each winter solstice, at which point, of course, I know the earth is moving back towards the light.

In sugaring season, the roads are impossibly muddy, and the still-leafless maples, teeming with life, are tapped for sap. Soon after, it's time for the annual vernal wildflower walks in the woods, which I often take with my friend and neighbor Gaelen. Gaelen and Richard, who live down the hill from me, are hands-down the best, more truly neighborly neighbors I have ever had.

Then summer: the garden, and swimming in the pond. Then fall. Then winter again.

I also live with two cats, and, about 3/4 of the time, my filmmaker boyfriend, David Koff, with whom I share (among many other things) huge pleasure in our vegetable garden, an insane love of goofy improvisational word play and speaking in funny voices, and fierce, fairly erudite discussions about politics, spirituality / materialism, etc. (When David is not here he is either in Los Angeles or on the road, doing film-related work.)

"Boyfriend." What a concept. See, I had twenty-three years with my adored soulmate, Ned Shank, with whom I shared adventures, enterprises, work, play, joy and just plain time and growing up (we met and married in our early twenties).

One day Ned went out on his usual 3-times-a- week bicycle ride. It was late afternoon, a sunny, exceptionally warm November day: this was back in Arkansas.

He and a red pick-up truck intersected. He bicycled into eternity, dying (or "leaving the body," as they say, I think aptly, in parts of India) on a stainless steel emergency room table at a hospital in Springdale, Arkansas.
It was November 30, 2000. He was 44.

An event like that knocks over everything in your life.

Grief is like nothing else. It's not within the human capacity to imagine it until you're in it. "Getting over it" , it being grief (and oh how one wants to be over it) is not an option. When grief wants you to feel it, you feel it. It is pure in the sense of absolute or undiluted. It's not volitional. I have never known an emotion more powerful, excoriating, and, because it is so beyond your ability to think your way out of it, humbling.

Yet, over time, one composts the agony and loss: love, absence, presence, experience, the acceptance of how little control we have over the biggest things in life.

And as all this decomposes, it slowly amends your existing mental/emotional/spiritual ground, the soil from which you grow. And yes, ultimately you are enriched (though I think, always, part of you would give up the enrichment in a heartbeat if only, if only, you could have the vanished one back).

But you can't.

That being so, eventually --- the length of time is different for everyone, and much depends on the particular relationship and the circumstances of the death --- one is able, and has to, choose. Will the loss of that person enrich or impoverish the survivor?

Impoverishment doubles the loss, by making it meaningless. Too, I think it does disservice to the one you loved; disservice, even, to love itself.

Ned, as I've said, was my soulmate. But, it turns out, not my sole mate. It's surprising and miraculous to love and be loved in a wholly different manner, as an adult, relatively late in life. David, my boyfriend/partner, and I walked, as opposed to fell, into love (in contrast to the some-enchanted-evening, instant recognition thing Ned and I had together). This slow, sweet amble David and I are taking is not something one hears much about in the tropes of love with which we're familiar. I think, as with writing and other creative processes, one is always being schooled by the practice itself.

Discovering this capacity for resilience, which is to say, a hunger for joy and life that will not be denied, is as humbling in its way as grief is. But love and resilience lift you up, while grief casts you down, down, down. Can I say, honestly, that I am grateful for the gifts of both? Yes, at long last, I can. And I do, daily.

Presently the caring-for-aging-elders thing is big in my life: my mother's 94, my aunt 99. ("What good genes you have, " say people affably, but yikes, they were SO much more financially together at my age than I am). At the moment we are all doing pretty well with it. My fingers are crossed, because the journey of these last years with them hasn't always been this smooth.

Oh, and I also do quite a bit of public speaking, creativity- and resilience-oriented, often centered on understanding and using the way our individual narratives shape our lives. Though I cringe at the word "motivational" , I've come to see, based on what others tell me, that I am a motivational speaker. Given my twin beliefs --- that narrative is powerful and within our control, and that nothing is wasted on the writer --- that motive has to do with recognizing the rich source of material that is our inner and outer lives, and using its vast, incalcuable gifts to create still richer lives.

I also teach a workshop I developed, Fearless Writing, as well as other workshops about creative reinvention. I do this at conferences, retreats, art schools, all over the place ("Place" being the whole world). The book on Fearless Writing, which I'm working on now, will be out in 2011, with Ten-Speed Press.

"You always teach what you most need to learn," said the psychologist Richard Price. Amen. That's why I keep teaching. That's why I keep writing and loving. Writing, teaching, and loving are the most formidable and exhilarating schools I know, and from which there is no graduation; only Continuing Education.

I think that finally, at this late date, I am becoming more patient with "all that is unanswered in my heart," as Rilke famously advised, "learning to love the questions themselves."

Not easy for a former know-it all... Lord, how I used to love a good definitive answer! Now all answers appear to me provisional: one of the strange gifts of loss.

It was my late father, also a writer, who gave me one of what has proven to be a large life wisdom-key: it was he who used to say, often, "Nothing is wasted on the writer."

I think when one lives right, or as rightly as one is able according to one's perspective at a given time, nothing is wasted, period.