Old nun on a walk The old nun and I set off for a walk to the top of the hill to catch the early winter sunset. We had been friends since she was my eighth grade teacher. She was eighty-three that … [Read more...]

Blog #10 Being a Writer  Continuing Orwell's Four Great Motives for Writing. (Motives 3 and 4: Historical Impulse and Political Purpose) Today is May 26, 2017, and in the past week two things on … [Read more...]

In "Why I Write," Orwell says as long as he remains alive he will continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solidobjects and scraps of … [Read more...]

It's going to take more posts than I anticipated to do justice to Orwell's "four great motives for writing prose." I spent all day thinking about his first motive: "sheer egotism," and breaking it … [Read more...]

A Writer's Inescapables Earlier in the week I was reading Rob Neufeld's ninth chapter in the book he is writing about my work (tentatively titled The Art of Becoming), and I was struck by this … [Read more...]

Being a Writer, part 1 of 3 "I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of … [Read more...]

Today, April 21, 2017, is the eve of Robert's sixteenth YEAR'S MIND, that lovely ancient church word for the anniversary of someone's death. Gear: the Old English word for "year," and mynd for … [Read more...]

Blog #4 April 14, 2017--Good Friday Book Tour Worries Less than two months away. Fly Albany to Raleigh, and then back and forth and up and down on the east coast. (I have posted my book travel … [Read more...]

Blog #3 Today is April 7, 2017 Despair is a room in my house. I don't go there: I find myself IN there. So far, I have come out again. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this. On Saturday, April 1, I … [Read more...]

Blog #2. Today is March 31, 2017. Last week, after I forwarded to you George Herbert's advice about "dressing and the undressing the soul," I wondered how I could draw it. The result surprised me. I … [Read more...]