ByGD
It’s probably a little out of character for me that I rarely attend authorial events. I’m not sure why I buy plane tickets and concert tickets but never buy speaker tickets, but there it is. And I’m discovering that it’s an unfortunate habit, because this winter I have twice been the grateful recipient of speaker tickets from thoughtful friends. Read More
ByGD
We tend to think of ourselves as a single, continuous existence. But even over the course of a single year, it’s amazing how much we can change. It doesn’t even have to be a year of upheaval. A while back, I posted a writing exercise I did for Geraldine Brooks’ workshop at Iceland Writers Retreat.
I actually took two of her workshops. The second writing exercise was to introduce yourself, to basically give your own personal elevator speech. I wrote this in April, and it’s amazing to me how much of it no longer applies to me this December. I can’t wait to see what I will write about myself in 2015. Read More
ByGD
Remove before entering shower.
One recent morning as I was second-guessing a paragraph for an article I was about to turn in, I stepped into the shower, and my glasses fogged up. ‘Good grief,’ I thought to myself as I dropped my glasses into the bathroom sink where it was relatively drier, ‘I’m turning into one of those absent-minded professor dads from the Disney movies.’ Read More
ByGD
I was stopped at a red light while driving my daughter to preschool. Next to me was one of those public wastelands, a strip of land between roads that served no purpose but to host weeds and give a municipal gardener one more thing to mow twice a year. It was covered in bright green spring grass. Too coarse to be a proper lawn grass, it still seemed too lush to be a native meadow grass. I wondered, ‘Is there such a thing as a weed lawn grass?’ and then wondered that I wondered. Two weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the grass. I would have been too absorbed in the inner monologue dictating my schedule for the day, and how the red light might affect it. But after Iceland Writers Retreat, the grass not only caught my attention, it piqued my curiosity. I blame Susan Orlean. Read More
ByGD
In the library at Bessastadir (the Icelandic White House)
Ironically, there is no collective noun for writers. According to Google, James Lipton has suggested “a worship of writers.” Although Lipton is an expert on collective nouns (he’s written a book about it after all) the term hasn’t caught on. The very people who both enshrine common usage of words and mint new words where language provides none have for centuries neglected to establish a collective noun for their own work. Perhaps this is because writing is such solitary work. Read More