Artist Dario Robleto once said, “With nothing to risk, love can’t exist.” Maybe that quote is resonating with me because my husband and I are approaching our 32nd anniversary. Though we’d been together for two and a half years by the time he asked me to marry him, and while we’d talked around the subject...
In the Mumford and Sons song, “Awake My Soul,” there’s a line that says, “Where you invest your love, you invest your life.” I just returned from a trip to visit my aunt. In her bathroom, she has a towel that reads, “Love, Family, Faith.” In those three things she has invested her entire life...
Let me see if I can articulate this correctly: Feel into this phrase, “I don’t care anymore.” Did you experience tension or relief? Most of us associate this declaration with something “bad.” When someone says it, we immediately jump into nurturing mode. “Oh, you don’t mean that,” we say. We search for ways to cheer...
I confess that I, too, have been using the word “unprecedented” to describe our current condition during this COVID-19 pandemic. And in so many ways, the word seems to fit. But then I came across these lines in Bill Bryson’s book, Shakespeare: The World as Stage, “London’s theaters were officially ordered shut, and would remain...
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, and artist. In an On Being interview with Long Soldier, she said, “Writing has shown me what happens with patience.” Oh wow, I thought. That’s an understatement! I don’t consider myself a terribly patient person. I’m an activator, someone who wants things to happen now,...
I’ve been working on my branding and the messaging for my new website. In running through various exercises to arrive at what I do best, I realized there is a consistent theme in my life’s work. Everything I’ve done—from my books and other writings, to my speaking and presentations, to my community work and activism—has...
January 27 is Multicultural Children’s Book Day, and it brings me around to an interesting conversation that’s underway in the publishing community–whether anyone has the right to tell stories outside of their race or culture. I have friends whose story ideas have lately been turned down because they wanted to write about a race different...
Ask any person on the street to name a famous painter, and they’ll likely say Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Monet, etc. Ask that same person to name a famous composer, and you’ll hear names like Mozart or Bach or Beethoven. According to statistics for 2014, male actors still out earned female actors in Hollywood. If you...
Several times over the past few years, I’ve listened to colleagues tell me that an editor who loved his/her work had called, sometimes in tears, to say they could not make an offer on their book project. Why? Because the marketing and sales departments at the publishing house decided that the book, though good, was...