Years ago I took a workshop from William Kittredge who taught creative writing at the University of Montana for thirty years. He said when he first started out teaching he was concerned with providing his students with information and techniques for writing. As time progressed he found that the most important [...]

Earlier I explained you could start with the word kumquats and if you let it, the writing would take you where it really wants to go. Below is a poem of mine that came from starting with the word raspberries and having no idea what I was going to write. This is [...]

Recently in my morning writing class I was explaining if you get your mind out of the way to allow what wants to be written from the place of your deeper wisdom and knowing, (aka the intelligence of your heart) then what truly wants to be written will flow out. I exclaimed, “You could write [...]

Imagination is more important than knowledge. – Albert Einstein
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born . . .
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of new clarity.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I often [...]

My first winter writing journey to Yosemite with a group in mid March was a great success. We stayed at the Yosemite Bug – Rustic Mountain Resort – Cabins, Restaurant, Health Spa, Hostel in Midpines 25 miles outside the Yosemite Valley in a two room cabin to ourselves .  We met up Friday evening for [...]

It’s not enough to have a dream or vision for your work, creativity or life and just visualize the intended outcome. You have to take action; and it’s easier to get started and keep going if you take a series of baby steps. Just one small step toward the life you really want will get [...]

Years ago I heard Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney give a lecture at the University of Washington. In the middle of this very academic speech, he paused, threw up both his hands and said, “oh, just write for the joy of it” and then dipped back into the lecture. I don’t remember anything [...]

The blood means nothing;
the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood,
moves the blood       – William Carlos Williams
People have lived in Ireland for about 7000 years settling there after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. The burial tombs at Newgrange are a thousand years older than the pyramids. [...]

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently, there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is not possibility. . .of saying, I’ll do it if I feel like it. – John Steinbeck
Woody Allen [...]

Living in uncertain times, we need some kind of certain presence which is independent of our outside accomplishments, which is independent of any shallow definitions of what it means to be successful. – David Whyte
Albert Einstein said, The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created [...]