“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief." --Helen Keller

Make a list of 10-20 smells that evoke the past for you, smells that hook you into a memory of a person, a place, a time in your life, or a particular incident. These smells can have either a positive or a negative association, or both. (Examples might be: vanilla extract, woodstove smoke, the smell of gasoline, Old Spice and cigarettes, bourbon on someone’s breath, Dr. Bronner’s soap).

Choose one smell from your list. Tell the ... [Continue Reading]

“When I was younger, I did a lot of ranting. But ranting is uncomposted writing. No one wants to accept the coffee grounds and the banana peels, but they will pick up the flower. We have to learn to write with love, until the light shines through.” --Sandra Cisneros, speech at San Miguel Writer’s Conference, 2012

Make a list of things that are still so raw that you can only rant about them. Make a second (shorter) list of things you’ve digested thoroughly--enough that you can write about them with the artistic distance necessary to craft writing that moves people who don’t know you. Then tell us a story from your second list.

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"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray." --Rumi

Tell me about what you really love. Not what you think you should love or what you try to love or what you wish you could love, but what you really love.

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“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise to noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed silence and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.” --Henry David Thoreau

When I let myself be still

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