Author: inkinherveins

• 14 Days of Writing

  

  I finished Jami Attenberg’s 1000 words of summer challenge June 13th. My total word count was 14426 words, and I wrote almost every one of the 14 days. I actually started this blog post the next day, and never finished it. That seems to be a theme with me, lately, when I try to write…

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• 1000 Words of Summer

  

  I’m on day 3 of Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer challenge. 1000 words a day for 14 days. So far, I’ve written 3815 words. I’m not much of a word-count girly these days, as I am not focused so much on producing new text as I am on revising existing text… though there are…

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• On energy and urgency

  

  I lost a potential editing client this week because my sense of urgency and time was different from theirs. They called me at the bookstore, and were unhappy that I cut the conversation short because I don’t talk about freelance work while on the clock for other jobs. They had wanted an immediate response, and…

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• Transitions

  April is a month of change, it seems. In 2022, in April, I began teaching yoga at Sweetgrass Therapeutics and offered my first writing workshop, independent of an academic setting. A couple of months before that, I had resigned from my tenured position as a college professor. As I finished out my semester, April became…

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• It’s poetry month and I can’t write poetry

  I love poetry month. I get excited about the idea of 30/30 (thirty poems in thirty days), I set up the books for the poetry display in the bookstore where I work, I look through my collections and try to choose favorite poems, and I eagerly await posts from others about the poetry they’re writing,…

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• lows and highs and lows again

  Eight years ago, I defended my doctoral dissertation and I passed. I didn’t expect to. I knew the work I submitted wasn’t that good. I wasn’t sure I could’ve done any better, though I wished I had. My defense was humiliating. Looking back, part of me wanted to fail the defense so I could just…

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• small destinies

  

  So often, we think of destiny on a large scale, as if it is only the major moments of life: who we’re meant to fall in love with, the career we’re meant to have, the major impact we’ll make in the arts, or teaching students, or making scientific discoveries. Destiny is this grand concept that…

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• Sadness in Winter

  I just finished reading Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. It came in on a library hold I’d forgotten that I placed. I already had three other books in progress, but I just added it into the roster since I own the other books and don’t have to…

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• The River flows on

  My memoir group, The River, met for the final time tonight. Endings are a strange thing, and not just in that cliched way of endings of some things being beginnings of something else. Endings are strange because nothing actually ends. Things fragment and fracture, yes, but pieces remain. For the past five months, I was…

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• Past-year(s) reflections

  As we come up on the change in the calendar year, it’s only natural, I suppose, to reflect on the past year. Since time really is a construct, my past year feels like it includes large parts of 2023, even if the calendar doesn’t. On that version of the calendar, my past year includes ending…

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