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For everything there is a season…
Every beginning has an ending and every ending has a beginning. At the beginning of this blog, I was a faithful writer penning short blog every other week for nine years. Some pieces were better than others, but all were given a quick edit by my dear friend, Sally. She was the first reader and she encouraged me to keep writing even when I didn’t find many readers. She liked the short pieces and the photographs that accompanied them. This accompanying photograph is not mine. It is a photograph of Virginia Woolf’s writing desk. I studied the works of Virginia Woolf and wrote my M.A. thesis at Brown University. What…
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Mrs. Woolf, Would You Care to Join Me for a Cup of Tea?
Prelude: I turned the corner of Great Russell Street and realized I was about to meet my favorite author, Virginia Woolf. My heart was filled with a mixture of awe, some intimidation, and the realization that we came from such different pasts. I finally decided that I would be just who I am – a woman who had fallen in love with her works in graduate school. Her battle with “moodiness” or what we now call bipolar illness interested me, but I probably would not be able to approach that most difficult subject. I had carefully chosen The Bloomsbury Hotel, not only because it was elegant, but also nearby were…
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Writing True
Looking from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Sooner or later, every writer feels the need to talk about her writing. It is in the bones. I have many shelves of writing books and one thing I have learned from them is that they can’t tell me how to write. Yes, we can learn excellent grammar, great plotting skills and clever metaphors, but in the end, writing comes from both the subconscious (the Jungian side of the brain) and the conscious (the thinking vibrant mind that is daily renewed by our observations, reading and engagement with others). The writer’s mind must sometimes engage itself with darkness as well as light, the…
