Bookmobile by Joyce Sutphen I spend part of my childhood waiting for the Sterns County Bookmobile. When it comes to town, it makes a U-turn in front of the grade school and glides into its place under the elms. It is a natural wonder of late afternoon. I try to imagine Dante, William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson traveling down a double lane highway together, country-western on the radio. Even when it arrives, I have to wait. The librarian is busy, getting out the inky pad and the lined cards. I pace back and forth in the line, hungry for the fresh bread of the page, because I need ... [Continue Reading]

“Time can do all sorts of things. It’s almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There’s nothing that time can’t do. Except run backwards. That’s its trouble really, it can only go one way.” ―Alex Shearer, The Stolen

Tell me about your relationship to time.

“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” --John Lennon

Tell me about a time this happened to you.

“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.” --Natalie Goldberg

Tell me about a specific time (or period of your life) when you let go of everything you thought you had to do.

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” --Anne Sexton

 What my soul is trying to tell me.

“I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.” --Blaise Pascal

Take a first draft of something you have written, that you like, and cut it by a quarter. Then cut it by another quarter. Do four revisions, each time cutting it further. (It’s okay to add a word or sentence or phrase as you go, as long as you keep honing your overall word count downward.) An alternative to this exercise is to choose a set number of words—say 300 or 700 or 950, and make your piece fit that space, with no extra words. Post your finished product here and tell us how you approached the process of editing.

“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.” --David Hare

Start with the phrase, “I believe,” and then complete the sentence. “I believe in magic.” “I believe it’s more important to have a clean house than it is to eat vegetables for dinner.” Then use, “I believe,” again, for the start of the second sentence. And the third. And the fourth. Repeat until you have nothing more to say. Don’t think or plan—just write. If you do this exercise well, some of the things you believe should surprise you.

"Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?" — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

How alive are you willing to be?

"It's a reactive thing, like a Geiger counter; you click whenever you come close to whatever you were built to do." -- Stephen King

Tell me about a time when you knew you were doing exactly what you were meant to do. Describe yourself doing that thing and show us how it felt to do it.

“Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words." --Valerie Sherwood

Make a list of things that passionately interest you. Choose one thing from your list and tell us about it.