Until the pandemic began, I practiced hot yoga for almost a decade. One day after class a young woman who had been practicing near me approached me in the locker room. She leaned toward me and brought her face close to mine. “You are a beast,”...
Time Out of Time
When I was teaching college-age and graduate fiction writers, I liked to use an exercise called “Braiding Time” to encourage the students to think about the interior lives of their characters and getting closer to understanding their habits of...
Alone Together
I first heard the term FOMO (fear of missing out) on a hike in the mountains with some former students and my husband. There were five of us present. After gaining some elevation we stopped for lunch at a small gloriously clear blue lake. As we...
Would We Write If We Were Immortal?
I have been thinking a lot about mortality these days, not morbidly, but with curiosity about what it means to live a life with the uncomfortable, sometimes scary, knowledge that it will certainly come to an end. A recent interview in The Sun...
Still Here
When I was diagnosed with an untreatable fatal disease two months ago (bulbar-onset ALS), I had the sensation of stepping off a treadmill. There were/are the expected existential thoughts brought on by the imminence of death, but alongside that I...