Creativity

  • Dear God: Are You there? Lately I have been wondering, as a few things have happened around our world that makes me question what’s really going on. Well, I guess it is a combination of things. I mean, bad stuff happens all the time. No real change there. The change is in us, and the…

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  • Neil Gaiman and Making Good Art

    Mark, a friend and fellow artist and educator, walked in to my classroom yesterday, just before noon. I was talking with Andrew, an alum from ’05 who is a fascinating individual and filmmaker. “Make good art,” is what Mark said. He stood there, smiled, and said it again. “Make good art.” Andrew and I looked…

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  • Creating stories — regardless of the genre — is all about making it real for your readers. They need to buy in to what you have created. If they don’t, then your credibility is shot, your readers will stop buying your books, and you can forget about establishing any kind of relationship with a reader…

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  • As we get ready to head back to school for the new academic year, I am aware of a movement that is sweeping across the country to make students and educators more mindful of their learning and their teaching. It is flying right in the face of high-stakes testing and assessment, but is it really…

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  • Mindfulness in the Heart of Baltimore

      I don’t know if you have ever read or seen Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but yesterday, walking mindfully through Baltimore on my way to a photo shoot for my new gig writing for our local paper, I had one of those “occurrences” in everything that I saw, heard, and felt. If…

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  • I have been in this cafe for a little over an hour, writing in my Daybook to the ambient sounds of chatter, the clanging of dishes, all blended with the meditative, hollow sounds of Deuter playing his bamboo flute. On these pages, I have written about singular moments I experienced decades ago along the marshy…

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  • Follow Your Passion

    Shift Your Energy, And Everything Changes. We all carry within us an enormous, limitless supply of energy and creativity. It has to come out of us in some form, and we make the decision time and time again how we expend it. Some of us make these decisions consciously; others have thrown themselves at the…

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  • Earlier today, I had the time to catch up on the recent letters posted at Postmarked: Piper’s Reach. Many things struck me as I found myself once again lost in the world of EL and Jude, but one thing remained with me throughout the day: The Interviews. For Jude, the interview is with Rebecca (Jude’s…

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  • My 2012 was filled with literary opportunities and relationships, both here in Baltimore and around the world. Along the way, I learned a great deal from several writers who take great risks with their words and paved the way for other writers to do the same. I contacted 13 writers, and 7 responded with links…

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  • In April 2012, two Australian writers — Jodi Cleghorn and Adam Byatt — began an ambitious collaborative project traversing an odd path between old and new forms of communication, differing modalities of storytelling and mixed media, all played out in real and suspended time. The project has at its heart a love of letter writing…

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