creativity

“don’t put this on your blog!”

December 8, 2011
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Dearest H, I know, I know, you told me not to put this on my blog. I understand that you’re nineteen and a college student and all, and being written about on your mom’s little blog could be pretty embarrassing. But really, buddy, who’s gonna know? I don’t use your real name, so anyone googling [...]

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it’s just something you do

November 22, 2011
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I went away for a writing retreat with friends this weekend. For years we’ve gathered at the coast, but this time we found ourselves on the backroads of Northern California. Instead of looking out over beaches, we had buttes. And a most changing landscape–for a landscape that at first seemed unchanging. We were astonished by [...]

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learning from thor and lego space marauders

September 30, 2011
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What do you do when your kid saves his money to buy a month-long subscription to the Lego Universe online game, and wants to talk of nothing else? You go with it. You look through some almanacs together (another recent obsession) and talk about graphs and charts and brainstorm how Lego Universe might lend itself [...]

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how’s this for a title: prefrontal cortexes, the 4th grade slump and writing

July 1, 2011

I can never resist a web link about creativity. Clicked on this one recently, about a creativity experiment with undergrads based on thinking like a kid. What interested me more than the experiment was this analysis of it: From The Frontal Cortex: Why does age make us less mature? Why accounts for the infamous 4th grade [...]

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the ultimate guide, ultimately

May 12, 2011

I’ve been meaning to report back on how Mr. T’s ultimate guide turned out. Rather than writing The Ultimate Guide to the Trojan War as he’d planned, he titled his opus The Ultimate Guide to the Ancient World. Why just cover one little war when you can take on the entire ancient world? His plan [...]

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atwitter: april

April 25, 2011

A few things that have me worked up these days: eggs! They’re wet and just-hunted for in this photo–you may even spy a tiny slug on one or two of them. (Which is what comes of them spending a few pre-dawn hours hidden in the backyard.) We used natural dyes on all of them but [...]

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it’s a giveaway: alphabet glue

April 19, 2011

I’ve never sponsored a giveaway here on the wonder farm. I’m giddy to see how it goes. I first heard of the new, downloadable quarterly magazine Alphabet Glue on my friend Molly’s blog, A Foothill Home Companion. (Molly never fails to inspire.) As soon as I read about the magazine, I wrote to its creator, Annie [...]

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