The last six weeks have been a swirl, let me tell you! So I thought I’d just go with that vibe and make this post its own swirl: things I’m excited about, random photos of a trip visiting dear friends who moved to Mexico, and a recipe for really tasty beans. — The Op-Ed Project. This project [...]

I’m doing it! I’m getting this free webinar series off the ground. Please come hang out with me online on Wednesday, March 30 at 5:00pm PST/8:00pm EST! As soon as I started playing with this idea, I knew exactly which topic I wanted to explore first. Turns out, it’s the tenth anniversary of a blog [...]

This was the month that my brain exploded. (If lengthy explanations of brain explosion aren’t your thing, scroll down for a few links to things I’ve loved lately.) For one, I worked privately with the writer Sabrina Orah Mark. Do you know her column Happily, for the Paris Review? It was a monthly column focusing [...]

A belated list of things that have kept me distracted from this lately, with unrelated photos from my recent trip to New York, where I went for a writing retreat upstate–that’s me with my writing mentor, Kate Moses–and to hang out with my two older kiddos in NYC. Laurie Colwin reissues. Years ago–okay, decades ago–when [...]

I made something!  It’s called a book proposal. A proposal is a document that nonfiction writers send to agents, pitching their books. They’re complex beasts, containing blurbs from other writers, an overview of the book you’re writing, marketing plans, comparative book titles, chapter summaries for each chapter in the book even if you haven’t written the whole [...]

I’m writing a chapter for my book about 2005. The year my boys were three and thirteen. One was in a band, the other in training pants. It felt like my life was circling back on itself at the same time it was charging into uncharted territory. On the Christmas video that year, the older [...]