Minnesota Woman Finally Finishes Last Journal
St. Cloud resident Barb Peterson announced yesterday that after sixty-two years of faithful journaling, she has finally used her last journal.
writing
7 posts
A Writer’s Life
What luck! A child awakes in the night to vomit and you get to hold back her hair and wipe her mouth and enfold her in your arms and whisper to her that you are there for her. She nestles in close, comforted by your very presence. This is truly the essence of life, and you are living it right now. It will also make a great story when you sit down to write about it.
Back on the Horse
Remember that that feeling of the first Monday back at work after the holidays? Did you drag your feet, struggling to get back on the well-trained horse of ruthless productivity? I must have heard the phrase “I’m having a hard time getting going” a dozen times. (Or perhaps the predictable, or at least...
Living Dangerously
There’s a scene in Gossip Girl, a show I greatly enjoyed while living in New York City during and after law school as a mental break from all that law—and which made me, in its portrayal of the emotional and relational challenges of my city’s super wealthy, grateful for my ordinary life,...
What I Am Afraid Of
All my life I’ve wanted to publish books. When I went on a mission trip to Haiti as a youth, I filled a small spiral notebook with a line by line of the entire experience, the intended first draft of the book I planned to publish about it. On family trips to...
Volunteers
I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past month, in my quest to evolve from “person who unleashes a steady stream of words on my laptop” to “writer people actually read.” (The fact that I’ve created these categories betrays my anxiety about being a pretender, as though I don’t count...
Everything is Given You
The turning of the seasons, and in particular, the hidden richness in the fallow winter season, have long been of special interest to me. When I lived in Brooklyn, I loved walking through the Botanic Garden in the dead months, hunting for the smallest signs of transformation. A bud months away from blossoms just starting...