The slaying of twelve people, many of them journalists, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French newspaper in Paris, has come as a psychic sucker punch to me this week. It is hard enough for writers and artists to fight the general negativity of society and their own self doubts in order to find their voices and speak their truths within their work. The threat of violence, let alone actual violence, can be…
The holiday season has passed. We didn’t decorate one whit and I’m fine with that. When I was growing up, my mom was BIG on Christmas. We had specific traditions, but I’m not sure if she made them up or they were passed down from her family. We started in on stringing the popcorn and cranberries around Thanksgiving. For those of you unfamiliar with this tradition, popcorn and cranberries are strung onto white thread using…
For my year of creative reading, which technically started in December 2014, not today (I’m not that fast a reader), I read David Lynch’s “Catching the Big Fish“. It is by THE David Lynch of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet fame. It contains mini-essays by Lynch about his experience with transcendental meditation and how he thinks about film making and the creative process. My surface impression of the book was, “Meh.” Perhaps it would have done more for…