A little something for the season from The Great Hunger: SOLSTICE   Belief sits like meat on the table before us. I fix the roast, mash the potatoes. The old world has shriveled to a candle flame in the middle of the table.   Why don’t we fall to our knees, given the huge labor…

Cicadas have a long larval stage, seventeen years for some, thirteen for others. My novels also go inert for years. I have often felt guilty and frustrated about my “inability” to finish these manuscripts. I see myself as one of those mossy sloths hanging upside down on a branch and gazing at a world that…

A friend of mine describes those critical inner voices as a committee that tells how we ought to behave. Mostly, these committee members have tenure for life and all too much power to make us believe in our chronic ineptitude. As writers we get outvoted on new ideas and the committee slashes the delicate ego…

Today we have a guest blog from Edie Rose. Edie, Fran Denancourt and I are near cousins: my father and Fran’s father had the same mother; Edie’s father and Fran’s had the same father. However, I feel like we are cousins in full because we share family history and a birthplace, Little Rhody. Fran does…

Sitting in my favorite spot at Lighthouse Writers Friday 500, I give myself the gift of free writing, time to let my mind wander, to explore loose, sunset thoughts as Denver sinks into the gloaming. What surfaces is an old dream scene, an Andrew Wyeth/Edward Hopper hybrid, a white farmhouse on a green slope, no…